The Clare Foundation provide funding to One Can Trust to support their Street Hero Campaign
What does your organisation do?
Provide emergency food parcels to people in crisis in our community. Serving High Wycombe, Marlow, and across South Bucks. Our Street Hero campaign has been hugely successful and has contributed a staggering amount of food to the local community since the beginning of the pandemic.
What are/were your challenges?
One Can Trust responded quickly to the challenge when lockdown was first introduced in March 2020, changing our operation overnight – we lost 80% of our work force due to age and vulnerability, all our hubs had to close, and the struggle for donations was very real due to panic buying. Since March 2020 we have home delivered every parcel to people in need – this has meant recruiting a team of volunteer drivers and increasing packing from just twice a week to 5 times a week.
In the months following lockdown, we were supporting around 2000 people per month (2156 throughout May) including over 1000 children. Therefore, our demand for support almost tripled in the 3 months between February and May.
The total number of people helped in April 2021 is 104% higher compared to March 2020.
How did The Clare Foundation help with your Street Hero Campaign?
What type of support have The Clare Foundation provided to you?
The Clare Foundation provided us with a £5000 grant to support the Street Hero Campaign which enabled us to buy some much needed racking for the warehouse so that we could use our limited space more effectively to store food parcels and do so in a much safer way.
A message from Jo Belshaw, Food Procurement Manager at One Can Trust…
“The One Can Trust team were thrilled to receive The Clare Foundation’s incredibly kind donation.
The number of parcels that we are packing continues to remain high (currently almost twice pre-pandemic levels). Together with the support of our wonderful community and generous businesses and organisations such as The Clare Foundation, we can continue to deliver food parcels to anyone in South Bucks who needs help”.
Martin Gallagher, CEO of The Clare Foundation says, “The One Can Trust is a leading charity in southern Buckinghamshire, I have known their Chairperson Graham Peart for a number of years and all those who work at One Can are dedicated people, hardworking and ready to serve in their community; their work to help the vulnerable and most in need now more than ever is critical, we were delighted to visit their site and have been very happy to work closely with Jo and her team at the office”
Robin Walker, The Clare Foundation Trustee also visited One Can Trust to see their amazing work.
“One Can Trust is a truly inspirational charity and The Clare Foundation was pleased to provide some support to assist with this work for which demand has significantly increased with the Covid pandemic. On visiting it was clear that the One Can Trust is providing much needed support at this difficult time, I was amazed how much they get done from a relatively small space so we are more than happy that we can help them make even better use of their space”
