M&S Manchester Piccadilly Gardens

We have been running a decade providing hot meals and clothing to our freinds on the streets daily to doing christmas dinners on the streets. This year we have been getting toy and food hampers for families struggling at Christmas, the elderly, and people suffering mental health and disabilities. We help all year round. We get no funding - just loving people donating to a excellent cause. I set up the group years ago after living rough and always said when I got on my feet I would help. 10 years on we're still giving back to communities - something we are passionate about. We are not just an outreach service. You become a shoulder to cry on, helping people through their low points in life. We have spent hours talking to our friends on the streets. We have taken in 15 homeless into our own home been in the media for this. We have put homeless in guest houses by raising funds on our group. We were recently in the Guardian for tracing a homeless friend's family in the USA. We can't turn our backs, something I for one am passionate about. We just struggle for food donations, for our weekly food bank handing out grab bags for children and bags of food for adults. We are raising funds on Bradley's angels every week to buy food to help families struggling elderly and those suffering with disabilities. Start of lickdown we was also taking food supplies to hospitals aswell as in communities.christmas 2020 we handed out over 100 presents. Please support our caring cause thank you ameera ramzan

We are a seven day drop-in support centre running form 6-8pm Monday to Friday and 5-7pm Saturday and Sunday. As we are run entirely by donations and volunteers any support we receive will be greatly appreciated by so many in so many ways. Coffee4Craig provides vital support for Manchester’s homeless and people in crisis. Each evening we operate an out of hours’ drop-in service in the heart of Manchester city centre. We offer hot food, showers, food parcels, medical support and mental health crisis intervention. It will enable us to provide more food parcels to the ever increasing number of families in need. Food parcels are provided on a non-judgemental basis and we aim to provide balanced meals for several days. We have close links with other like-minded organisations in the area and we support each other in various ways. The bigger the support network for the homeless in the north west the more chance we have of helping. Donations may also enable us to venture into new projects and open other doors. We are keen to develop education packages to take into schools and this will be developed as we grow with the support of our volunteers. We want to show children, as well as adults, that it is ok to help the homeless.

Our aims and values in this project are; Reducing the amount of food that goes to waste Around 15 million tonnes of food is wasted every year in the UK alone, and the vast majority of that food is perfectly edible. The lowest carbon, most sustainable thing we can do with food that is going to go to waste is put it in a belly, any belly, rather than a bin, any bin (landfill, anaerobic digestion, animal feed, or compost). For every tonne of food that we save from going to waste, we save around 4.2 tonnes of CO2e from being emitted, and around 10% of the UK’s carbon footprint comes from food that is produced but never eaten. Providing access to enough food and great food for all Open Kitchen MCR is, among many other things, a live experiment in alternative economic models. The project operated for 3 years on a pay-as-you-feel basis, inviting members of the public to decide how much they would pay for their meal in a huge range of settings. While this model had huge social and environmental positives, it proved financially unsustainable. Open Kitchen MCR’s catering social enterprise operates on a pay-it-forward basis. The project offers catering at set prices, with one rate for private and corporate customers, a lower rate for established not-for-profit groups, and free or heavily subsidised catering for grassroots groups who are supporting vulnerable adults. Dignity, choice and social inclusion - a positive community future Our pay-as-you-feel model (employed at our city centre restaurant, open from Sep 2017 - Aug 2018) offered an innovative, inclusive model that deliberately bucked the trend towards dedicated “food poverty project” models. There are a number of projects that target people in food poverty, and in our current economic climate they are essential. However, the fact remains that by targeting people in food poverty, we also further separate and isolate them. Open Kitchen MCR aims to develop an alternative model that can evolve along side these projects, and offer a more inclusive option to bring a wider range of people together. Unfortunately, we found it wasn’t possible to support pay-as-you-feel financially, for a range of reasons. Our current outside catering venture operates on a pay-it-forward model, and supports grassroots groups that offer dignity, choice and support to vulnerable adults. We hope to continue our experiment into alternative economic models, and trial a new socially inclusive cafe / restaurant space in 2020.