The Great Places Community Investment Team and partners stepped up and backed Manchester United and England star’s Marcus Rashford’s campaign to feed children over the school holidays, supporting two wonderful initiatives in Yorkshire.
The Manor and Castle Development Trust (MCDT) in Sheffield led the Healthy Holidays programme in the ward, providing food hampers and further support to school children receiving free school meals or otherwise required some additional assistance.
Supplementing an existing grant, Great Places’ £1840 donation over the October and Christmas holiday periods enabled the expansion of this Healthy Holidays offer, both in terms of recipient numbers and the programme’s content.
Over the October half-term, 382 food hampers were distributed to children in the area.
Great Places’ donation provided a fun activity booklet in each of these hampers, tickets for families to attend the Green Estate, Spooky Window competition prizes and further funding support for youth engagement activities.
Funding at Christmas contributed to the expansion of the Healthy Holiday hampers to reach 450 young people and families, as well as supporting the provision of gifts to those who most required them.
In addition to the support of the Healthy Holidays initiative, further funding was provided to support the S2 Foodbank’s Christmas Hamper programme, whilst 17 Great Places households identified as having had particularly challenging years, were gifted food hampers and bags of toys as part of our Cheery Christmas programme. In all, a total of 3940kg of food was distributed across the area over the Christmas period.
One resident said “I’ve just received my parcel and want to say thank you so, so much! I’m really grateful for what you’ve done and thanks to the lovely driver for delivering it. Thanks again and Merry Christmas to you and a Happy New Year.”
