Christmas Joy Campaign 2024

Over the past four years, we have run successful campaigns to help the local community through both Covid and the Cost of Living Crisis.

The response from the community has been overwhelming. With your help we have raised over £42,000 in total. This money has had a huge impact on the local community:

- Working with our friends at St Mary’s Church, we have made and delivered almost 600 hampers to families in the local area

- We have distributed hundreds of vouchers to families to support them through the school holidays, allowing them to pay for fresh meat, fruit and vegetables from local providers

- We have made large cash donations to local food banks and to funds supporting local families through the crisis

The feedback we have had is uniformly positive, with many families declaring it a lifeline, and something that they just cannot get by without. 

Therefore we want to keep providing this help, and to do this we need your help again...

As a minimum, we are again looking to raise enough money to distribute 170 Christmas Hampers to families in need in the Bridport and Beaminster area.

As before, these will not be emergency food parcels – our friends at Cupboard Love and Beaminster food bank will continue to supply these to those who need them.

Rather, our Christmas Hampers are intended to ensure that every family that received one has all the necessary ingredients to enjoy a traditional family Christmas.

The Hampers will contain enough food for a full Christmas dinner and more for a family of four: they will contain a Turkey, and all the trimmings, all fresh and locally sourced; they will contain cheese, biscuits and chutney; Christmas pudding, and yule log. Finally, they will also contain enough sweets and chocolates to comfortably last the Christmas period! 

For those families who receive a Hamper, this will mean one less thing to worry about. But like previous years, we want to do more!

Our campaign will also look to help local food banks, whose value to the community continues to grow through these difficult times. Every penny we raise over the amount needed to fund the hampers will go directly towards critical foodstuffs and essentials for the people supported by the food banks in Bridport and Beaminster...

We know previous years have been great successes, fuelled by the enthusiasm local people and businesses had for the cause. Whilst it may not be possible to match the £22k raised in 2022, we want to shoot again for a high number - every penny counts, and will be spent helping local people get through these hard times!

With that in mind our target for this year is to raise £8,000, which would give us enough to make and deliver all 170 hampers. Every penny more than that will go to to making a meaningful impact to the community over the next year by supporting the food banks.

This sounds an awful lot to raise, but we are hoping again that Crowdfunder will be able to help us by connecting us to their match funding partners, amplifying every donation you make by adding corporate funds to the pot. This has had an absolutely phenomenal impact in previous years, and if our application is successful will bring in significant levels of new money into the town to help us.

Add this to our ability to obtain gift aid from the government, and we are again incredibly well placed to meet are target.

So please be as generous as you can, and help us get as much money as possible into the town and the surrounding areas to help those who need it most.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. At this really difficult time we know that those who can help, will help. 

This is a special area, with people who have gone above and beyond over the past months and years to support their friends and neighbours when they have needed it the most. 

Your donation will help us continue that great work.