ALDI UTTOXETER - OLD KNOTTY WAY

St Oswalds is the historic parish church of Ashbourne in the heart of Derbyshire. As well as offering a spiritual space for tourists and pilgrims, St Oswalds also serves the town and neighbouring villages by: * serving hot meals every week for the elderly and isolated (both 'sit down' meals and take-aways * offering drop-in support groups, such as for carers and for bereaved people * running a weekly parents/carers and children group * supporting particular groups, such as Ukranian visitors and refugees and much more! We also host many local charities, groups and uniformed organisations, and we are always on the look out for people and groups with whom we can partner.

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.

A project using animals, plants, countryside and creativity to help those recovering from poor mental ill health. We also support victims of domestic violence and people who need help to improve their well being. We cook food for over 200 people a week, for some people this is the only nutritional/hot meal they have. We have a cook who is very inventive and creates lots of different dishes depending upon what we have available. If there are any surplus meals the people on the project can take them home. We do grow vegetables and some fruit in our allotment, but obviousley seasonal.