SUNDERLAND COMMUNITY SOUP KITCHEN LTD

Sunderland Community Soup Kitchens overall objective is the relief of poverty for people who live and work in Sunderland, as well as providing people with the information, advice and guidance they need to become resilient and tackling the challenges ....more

Sunderland Community Soup Kitchens overall objective is the relief of poverty for people who live and work in Sunderland, as well as providing people with the information, advice and guidance they need to become resilient and tackling the challenges they face. This grant will be used to support our aims in achieving such objective and we will do this by using the grant to train more volunteers into new and existing roles within the organisation. We will also use the grant to retrain existing volunteers so they are capable of supporting various organisational goals across multiple sites and varying roles. It is our hope that we can train and further retrain 15-25 volunteers to support our project delivery. This will encompass all elements of the organisational activity including operational support, packing food parcels, supporting in the community allotment and supporting our chef in serving food to service users, enabling service delivery expansion. We aim to be able to utilise our community fridge more and provide people with daily essentials such as milk, butter and yoghurt, but due to soaring energy bills we have had to reduce the amount of perishable goods we can store in our venues. This grant will enable us to provide more people with the aforementioned items as we will use part of the grant to cover running costs incurred by the charity, namely our energy bills. We have witnessed a large increase in the demand for our services and we aim to support every individual that steps through our door, so this grant would help us tremendously in supporting those people. We are now supporting 40% more people per week than we were prior to the cost of living crisis. As is the case with most organisations, we too, have been affected by the crisis and we aim to use this grant to ensure the longevity of our services can be solidified and continue to support the most vulnerable people in our society, which includes using a proportion of this grant to cover core staff salaries. We will assess grant outcomes following grant completion and use project data to assess the success of the project and use such data to inform us of any changes we need to make for future delivery, which will support us in reaching our charitable objectives. We will support people with their mental health and wellbeing struggles by training our paid staff and volunteers to have the skills, knowledge and community connections needed for signposting people into local specialist services.