Sainsbury's Oakley

Aspire Foundation are running a wide variety of free community events through the Community Family Worker Project, including cooking classes, first aid workshops, trips to the beach and summer playschemes. Alongside this, the Community Family Workers run weekly groups in centres across the Cheltenham and Tewkesbury localities. The aim of the groups is to bridge the gaps in services between universal and targeted support, allowing families an opportunity to learn, play and socialise in a safe and friendly environment. We are also able to make a distribute food parcels for families in need through these groups.

The St Michael's Cornerstone Trust exists to support the people of the Lynworth, Priors and Whaddon area of Cheltenham. We focus in particular on the relief of poverty, the advancement of education, the maintenance and improvement of public amenities and the provision of leisure facilities in the interests of social welfare. We run a coffee shop offering affordable hot and cold drinks which serves as a local hub, alongside a charity shop, a reasonably priced laundry service and free access IT facilities. In addition to this we run lots of different groups throughout the week - an art group, a homework club, a Boccia group, coffee mornings, soup lunch, a toddler group, a board games group, bingo sessions, and a knit and natter group. In addition we also rent out our facilities to local businesses and so also offer an over 50s fitness class and a chiropodist's services. Our facilities are also hired by local counselors from various agencies to see clients. Being community minded, we have facilitated having a community defibrillator fitted on to the local shop, and are involved in providing trained staff to supplement this. We are now setting up a Food Pantry service, to provide food for local families and individuals in need. We want to be able to provide an holistic service to people in need in our locality, including additional support as well as the basic food, in order to help reduce inequality and poverty in our area of Cheltenham.

We are a small rural community group that distributes surplus fresh food collected from various nearby urban supermarkets and food outlets to individual families within our local community at no charge to those who benefit. A dedicated space with a fridge / freezer has been set aside in the village for this initiative providing us with the opportunity to help local families keep their fresh food costs down and provide a vital service to the community many of whom cannot get to a food bank. With some disadvantaged users identified by our local schools, community groups and local Councillors, the primary purpose is for this perfectly edible food to be consumed rather than being thrown into landfill. Our sole focus is on the distrubution of surplus food with some 3.8 tonnes being collected per annum which equates to the provision of over 8,000 meals. Equally as important, this consumption of food rather than being thrown away has resulted in over 12 tonnes of CO2 being averted from entering the atmosphere every year.