Emotional & Practically supporting BAME

Aim

Provide practical support and food packages

JCOCI EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION LTD helps disadvantaged, underprivileged families in Canvey Island, Essex. We help over 200 families annually.  

Our beneficiaries, many from BAME backgrounds, live in areas of Essex that rank within the lowest 30% on the Indices of Multiple Deprivation and suffer from multiple disadvantages primarily poverty, discrimination, social and digital exclusion, overcrowding, poor attainment, lack of positive opportunities and poor emotional wellbeing.

Inflation has reached a 30-year high and we are seeing increased poverty across the country, especially in and around disadvantaged communities.

We support Orthodox Jewish families living in poverty, and whose circumstances worsened because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of these families are large, living in areas of high deprivation in often overcrowded accommodations. 

To compound these difficulties, families are now facing increases in the cost of living, interest rate rises, and unprecedented energy bills.  The orthodox Jewish community cannot access food banks, Fairshare, or community fridges as the food supplied is not Kosher.

Money worries amid cost-of-living crisis worse than Covid-19 pandemic.
Money worries have been worse during the cost-of-living crisis than the coronavirus pandemic, with women more concerned than men about their finances.

We will:
1] Provide signposting for benefits and debt issues and help them to access training and employment support.

2] Send out emergency food packages. We’ve worked with nutritionists to make sure that the food parcels supplied by food banks contain at least three days’ worth of nutritionally balanced meals for individuals and families. These emergency food parcels are not designed to meet long-term needs – that’s why food banks also offer additional support like debt advice where possible.

A typical food parcel includes:
Cereal, Soup, Pasta, Rice, Tinned tomatoes/ pasta sauce, Lentils, beans and pulses, Meat, Tinned vegetables, Tea/coffee, Tinned fruit, Biscuits, milk and Fruit juice.

Food banks will also provide essential non-food items like toiletries and hygiene products where they can.

The difference this project will make is to provide families with the food they need to get them through extremely challenging financial circumstances.  However, it will further support them by ensuring they get to other help they need, be it benefits, debt advice, housing, or other issues.  

This project successfully funded on 11th December 2022