Our aim is to make in-roads to alleviate severe systemic socio-economic deprivation & persistent poverty to local families with children
by Becky McGlone in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom
If we are lucky enough to have extra money, we would send out a survey to the local community and introduce new ideas based on the needs of the community. We would also use the extra money to renovate our new office space to make it accessible for the local community to attend our new upcoming group sessions
We run solely on donations, funding, and sponsorship to provide hope and support to vulnerable children and young people in the Bassetlaw District of North Nottinghamshire to improve their quality of live.
Our sole aim is to make in-roads to alleviate severe systemic socio-economic deprivation and persistent poverty to local families with children and young people and provide them with the resources they need to lead a better quality of life.
Our services support various individual needs for young people and families with children between the ages of 0-18 years and up to 21 years for those with disabilities. These include; clothing, furniture, educational activity packs, fitness sessions, school uniform, sporting equipments and kits. However, all requests and circumstances will need to meet the set criteria.
We have recently partnered up with ‘The Boot Room Bassetlaw’. Together we take in donations of sporting equipment, wash and have pop up events to distribute these to the community free of charge. We have also partnered up with a local football coach Andi from AC Football who helps deliver football sessions to the community free of charge. We run on donations on funding, so our amazing volunteers do fundraising events for us to fund these sessions so they are free to the community. We stared these football sessions in 2018 and 75 children attended (orange collage above). Due to the recent pandemic we restarted these football sessions and in 2022 we had around 50 children attend in July. (photo above in pink). Due to the high demand in fitness programs we are renovating our charity van into a permanent boot room pop up shop, so the community can come to us and take what they need, free of charge. We display boots and sporting equipment at our school uniform pop up shops and have already helped children and adults get active with donations of equipment
FTHC have also teamed up with local churches (Now Church and Poplars Church) to provide free school uniform for children within the local community. We take donations of jumpers, shirts, trousers, dresses, shoes etc and have pop up events at hotspots in the community. We started doing pop up events in 2021, 3 events in the year. At each event we helped around 50 children with school uniform, totalling 150 children in 2021, and in 2022 we helped around 250 children. Due to the high demand in this service we are doing a permanent pop up store in our new charity office for the community to take what they need.
At Easter, during the summer holidays and at Christmas we hand our free educational activity packs to children in the community. This is to keep their minds busy during the school breaks and to encourage parent-child relationships. We started these during lockdown 2020 and they have been in high demand each year. Volunteers make up the packs and at seasonal events in the year we will hand them out.
We run drop in sessions for the community in our charity office. This is a safe space for everyone that enters where our volunteers are on hand to offer help, advice or even just to chat. We are looking at starting seasonal craft events in our office space for events such as making Mother’s Day cards, Father’s Day cards, summer crafts and Christmas cards, which will be free of charge to the community.