THE PENTECOSTAL CITY MISSION CHURCH (WILLESDEN)

The City Mission Food Aid Partnership

Goal: £50,000

Donate to help us find an alternative foodbank delivery site and continue providing food aid to people in need.

The Pentecostal City Mission Church currently delivers essential food aid in Northwest London to over 800 families a week. 

Since the pandemic, the organisation has provided 30,000 food parcels with a soup kitchen, food bank and doorstep deliveries.  If you've ever seen our site on Scrubs Lane, you'll notice the long queue with families, people in full time work, people with disabilities and children waiting to receive a meal.  

But we were evicted in March 2022 by our landlord, Fruition Properties.  We had to continue our food aid work outdoors in the forecourt.  

With the on-going cost of living crisis, our food bank services are hanging by a thread as we have a monthly licence to use the outdoor courtyard of our building which could be withdrawn at any moment. Wthout our food aid, the hundreds of people we support could be made destitute.  

We need your support to help us with the challenge to retain the Scrubs Lane site for community use and continue to fund our work so we can support people in need of our services.

Donate, share our link, shout about our campaign, and help us to #SaveOurFoodBank.  We want to utilise people power so we can take on developer power and win.  

The story so far

In 2020 with the benefit of a grant from the National Lottery our charity scaled up a pilot scheme delivering hot meals and providing a soup kitchen into a foodbank and van parcel drops as a response to Covid-19 Pandemic which pushed more residents into food poverty. 

Since then we have delivered over 30,000 meals and at a rate of at least 800 meals per week to individuals and families. We have distributed over 100 cases of food to local primary schools, other foodbanks across the Capital, and other community groups. We have achieved this with the support of the food networks including the Felix Project and City Harvest and the help of our many volunteers. 

The demand for our help is increasing and the current energy crisis which is fuelling price inflation and the cost of living crisis have made the need for food aid even greater. Like other foodbanks the crisis put severe pressure on food supplies and donations. The building which we built and have occupied since 2007 was bought by a developer in 2015.  The charity was working cooperatively with the developer on a scheme which would reprovided community space in the new building. The relationship broke down which ultimately led to the charity's eviction. 

The eviction has put the continuation of our in demand foodbank in peril. Access by the community to the support and activities we provided from the building including Childcare, a dementia cafe, children's contact centre and youth training and mentoring activities are also at risk. The support you can give will help us to fund equipment, staff, resources and supplies to distribute from a more secure alternative site. Your support will also help towards meeting the costs of working up a viable bid scheme with partners to fight to retain the building  as a community asset with a development that provides a mix of community activities and affordable social housing.

More info

Our Charity has been embedded in the community of North Hammersmith and South Brent for over 13 years responding to the needs of residents. Through our trading entity and project activities, the Charity provides access to community resources and support to improve the social welfare of residents in the neighbourhoods Harlesden, Stonebridge, College Park and Old Oak and adjacent wards. 

We work in partnership with statutory agencies and the local community to address disadvantage, isolation, food poverty and to support neighbourhood renewal. This is achieved by providing affordable early years and wrap around childcare, elderly health and wellbeing activities, a Children's Contact Centre, food aid, a dementia café, a supplementary school, youth club, a youth mentoring programme in schools, creative industries training for children and young people.

The Charity's activities are inclusive promoting equal access to all residents. We encourage active participation from the community in shaping the delivery of services to meet the needs of our beneficiary groups.

2 Scrubs Lane was developed into a valuable local resource as a hub for training, meetings, social interaction, and community engagement. The landlords' plans since 2015 to develop the site into a 20-storey building with community space is uncertain placing the building at high risk of disposal. 

We need your support in campaigning to prevent the loss of community access to services and facilities from the site.

Our dispute and subsequent eviction from the building has caused service displacement and severely destabilised our food aid operation. We need your support to raise £50,000 to fund the costs and resources required to relocate the foodbank and fight to retain 2 Scrubs Lane for community use. Your support will enable us to continue to help people in need like Ms Green, a mother-of-two, who has Scoliosis, and whose children used to attend the church’s after-school clubs and receive extra tuition for maths and English from our supplementary school. She said to reporters covering the eviction. “City Mission have classes for the elderly and sessions where they can do some exercise. They deliver food to people. Since Covid-19 a lot of people have been there for food.”

We have identified a range of urgent and ongoing needs in the communities we provide services for. Your support will help us to develop and attract funding for new initiatives to improve the social infrastructure in the neighbourhoods we serve. This includes plans to extend our food aid partnership into a food pantry and adding a community kitchen.