M&S Worthing

The Community House is for the community. We offer a pop-up foodbank every morning from Monday to Friday at 9.30am. We are also able to offer activities and support. All activities are free of charge. We can help with job searching and employment skills, universal credit claims and other benefit advice. We have a computer suite with printing facilities. In addition to this, we provide community activities such as mindfulness, walking group, cooking sessions and painting and craft sessions. We also have access to a counsellor and hypnotherapist.

Our Community Hub provides a Food & Pet Pantry and a school uniform centre in order to support people who are struggling to manage. Members can access free bread, fruit and vegetables. In addition they have access to £15-20 worth of food for a small donation. We also provide a Community Cafe with free drinks, snacks and listening volunteers to reduce loneliness and isolation.

After several years of working in the local community Storm now has the opportunity to develop an allotment project. For 8 years now we have been gardening in the town centre on various plots of land given to us by the local council - mixing up the planting with flowers and vegetables and brightening up the plots with various knitted items produced by our Make n Munch group. We have also been feeding members of the local rough sleeping and insecurely housed community for the last 6 years - initially running a soup run, laterally offering a hot meal once a week and for the third year running coordinating and hosting one night a week of Worthing's Winter Night Shelter. Since all the changes that Covid brought which meant that voluntary groups are no longer able to run Shelters, we now run a twice weekly food run which is open to anyone in need. We have built a good reputation among the local community and been able to offer opportunities to the people we feed to get involved in some of our other projects - knitting, gardening, litter picking, Recovery Course. Now we have a brilliant opportunity to manage an allotment for Storm. This will enable us to build relationships, offer real opportunities for people to learn skills, be part of a great team and produce food that can then be cooked, eaten and served to others.