Newsletter from the second lockdown - November 2020

21st November 2020

We hope you are all keeping well and coping with this second lockdown – not as fierce as the first but definitely restricting our enjoyment of coffee and cake at local cafes!  And, with grey, damp weather too, it is hard not to get bored and disgruntled.

The requests for grants are really erratic right now – professional workers are again working from home and not seeing clients face-to-face, so there are far fewer, but the ones that come in are urgent and complicated and illustrate how hard life is for some families. For example, both parents of a young family who have just been housed were made redundant at the same time so they cannot afford anything at all for the house, neither furniture nor white goods.

Financially, our short publicity article in the various parish magazines and the Poundbury e-circulation has produced unprecedented donations. These have come from generous individuals and from local trust funds that we have not previously heard of.  Thank you so much to all those who have donated.

Margaret, Kath and Wendy put together the main points to cover in a short presentation to the Churches Together AGM on Zoom on November 5^th . It was a great opportunity to be heard by the new church leaders and by recently re-joined evangelical churches. One supporter present was kind enough to say that the presentation was ‘riveting’! Certainly one of the outcomes has been an approach from the Storehouse Church to work in partnership with their plans to provide food parcels – not free but at half price – plus debt counselling and mental health support for people in genuine financial crisis. The Pastor hopes he might draw together all the local church and community charities that are trying to do something similar, as well as working alongside Citizens’ Advice. There will be more of this in the new year, we hope.

The Coop gift cards are on order and we will be distributing 450 of them at £10 each to 10 local helping agencies at the end of this month, thanks to Janet and Claire. We have also provided £150 to each of three agencies that needed help to provide a Christmas dinner for their residents – both young people and carers.

Margaret, Wendy, Kath, Karen and Peter