The Commo

Our Community, in partnership with small local businesses including Red Neighbours, Clear Futures, DHL, and the local schools helped us to help others. We are fortunate that we worked together to help others even before the pandemic hit. Knowing that there are families suffering, after losing their jobs, and waiting on the cruel universal credit, the Covid-19 virus just added hundreds more to the despair; the unknown was frightening. Families are who we focused on and we done everything we could to help community spirits; it was amazing.

We cooked up to 500 meals a week, going out to our elderly and vulnerable and those in isolation. The stories were hard to swallow. Back in march when we closed our centre to the public, due to lockdown,  many people broke down in tears and fear set in, many who lived alone thought they would be left to starve and waste away, some also told us the fear they had they would die alone. This broke my heart.  I knew I had to do something to help. Especially for all those people of all ages and all walks of life who depended on our centre, “their Commo”, to put a plan in place.

I sat down with our volunteers, Lol, Bev, Sheila and Iris and we came up with a plan. Within days we had spoken with many, got together with local councillors, finding pots of funding and our plan fell into place. Many residents and small business owners joined our team, helping us to deliver the meals each week. In the meantime, we heard Knowsley was setting up a hub. So we could direct people to them for anything we could not do ourselves, this was a relief for many and very much needed. This continued for 5 months until Shielding ended on the 1st of August. We opened the centre back up on the 3rd August and put all social distance measures in place. The joy and beautiful smiles that walked back in our centre were a relief. They couldn’t thank us enough. We were just so happy they all survived. Their tears this time were of joy.

We sent out hampers  to families who either lost their jobs, were furloughed or had only 1 wage coming into to cover 3/4 wages , U/C etc. We also helped families throughout the 6 weeks holidays, we took many meals to our homeless in Fazakerley hostel, and made biscuit hampers up donated from DHL, to our elderly and care homes throughout Kirkby.

Not forgetting that at the beginning of the lockdown we went through Easter, so our Lovely Easter bunny travelled round every street to give many children Easter eggs . Donated from Nikki from our local toy appeal, Hen from Red Neighbours and last but not least our community. We gave out over 600 Easter eggs, another 500 went out in our family hampers.

We received many drawings and photos from the children thanking us. This is only a small flavour of what we did and how doing this helped us cope throughout it all.