B&Q Uttoxeter

We run our humble operation out of a kitchen in the centre of Stafford town. Each week our volunteers take turns to cook a hot, home-cooked meal for our guests, who are growing in their numbers every week. Fantastic homely meals aren’t the only thing on the HOB menu, friendship, support, advice and someone to listen are available to all our visitors, or as we like to call them our friends. Ask any of our visitors and they will tell you, it isn’t a house that makes a home; it’s the family inside it. House of Bread is like a real home; we eat together, laugh together, cry together, share success and support each other in times of crisis.

We were established in 2020 as recycling group to help with landfill waste, and it grew from there. We help families in the surrounding area with food parcels and other items if needed. We rent a room in uttoxeter town centre to store the food bank items, at the Globe Eco foundation centre. We identify who can use us by them simply asking us for help or if someone asks on their behalf. We do not charge any fees for our service. We have been known to reach out to Uttoxeter Lions if we need any help sourcing some items for people and vise versa. We do a fundraising event twice a year at the Uttoxeter lions events - Lark in the Park and Christmas Cracker, plus other smaller ones through out the year. The large ones we contact local businesses for donations towards a huge raffle, which is always a massive success and really helpful. At Christmas and Easter we do appeals, where we get nominations from people who feel they know someone who deserves something extra or maybe they are going to have nothing at all to open on these holidays. We make all of these hampers. At Christmas they will include various items like toys, clothes, beauty products, chocolates, sweets and loads more. Then Easter eggs for all the nominated children. We also do eat well in summer, where we fundraise and the food parcels are to include fresh produce, we have postponed this for this year until Autumn/Winter. Neighbourly is the only place where we would collect any food surplus from retailers. We don't do just food parcels, people can come to us to ask for help with anything, we have helped with people fleeing due to DV or helping people who are moving home with nothing. In the summer 2025 we also ran an eat well campaign. This meant that 23 families had fresh food for up to 3 weeks, a long with activity packs for the children.

Our tenancy support service provides high quality accommodation and low level housing management support for people affected by mental illness aged 18 years and above, who are at risk of not accessing or sustaining a home because of their mental health, vulnerability and/or a history of housing related problems. We have 16 units of self contained accommodation in Cheadle varying from bedsits, flats and houses. Currently with the cost of living crisis many of our tenants are having to make the decision between heating or eating, we would like to be able to collect surplus supplies from local suppliers so we can provide a warm room for our tenants in the staff office, so tenants can charge any electricals, get warm and we would like to be able to provide them with some food to help them get through the week without them having to make the decision between eating or heating, staff will be volunteering there own time to run this and there would be no charge for the tenants. We currently work with the local food bank and refer tenants when needed but in recent months, tenants are struggling more and more and we are having to refer to the food bank more frequently which is then adding extra pressure on to there service, we currently don't collect any surplus food.