Getir Ardwick

We are a charity called the Wai Yin Society set up by women within the Chinese community initially for Chinese women but which over the years has diversified to include other ethnic minority groups of all genders. Our centre is the Welcome Centre based in Cheetham Hill, Manchester where we serve a highly diverse population in an area of high deprivation. We aim to meet the immediate and practical needs of large numbers of service users as well as provide an easily accessible advice service. We have a community café, an urban farm with chickens and ducks, we run sessions for furniture upcycling and computing skills. We provide welfare and education services including art/calligraphy classes and ESOL classes; a laundry service for the homeless and those in need; basic toiletries; emergency food parcels and a clothes bank. We run gardening sessions at the Welcome Centre as well as at allotments behind the Irish Heritage Centre. We run a work club to help people get back into the job market and IT drop in sessions for those who do not have access to a computer or the internet and cycle repair facilities once a week. The Self Help organisation uses our Centre 3 days a week as a base for seeing clients in the North Manchester area. We host NHS health checks and cancer support groups and run accredited training courses to improve employment prospects. We run advice sessions to help people in crisis, supporting them in applying for various benefits, dealing with debts and a host of everyday problems. In the year between 1st June 2018 and 31st May 2019 we had a footfall of almost 19,000. We provided 6228 hot lunches and 880 emergency food parcels. Lunches cost 50p if service users can afford to pay, otherwise they are provided free. We receive a basic grant from Manchester City Council to provide the emergency food parcels, but this does not cover the cost for the number of people who are being referred to us by Job Centres, Advice Centres, Social Services, Community nurses etc. We go to Fruitful Office once a week to collect fruit and to Costco in Chadderton once a week to collect the donations. These donations are distributed to those in need as well as being used to provide lunches in the Community Cafe. We serve not only the local communities of Cheetham Hill and Crumpsall but people come to us from Blackley, Harpurhey, Moston and as far afield as Ashton and Bolton.

Our charity is a community development not for profit organisation that offers food to people who are in need. It aims to offer multi-faceted contributions to communities, advances community and development goals and works to fill the overall needs for its targeted focus areas.Our faith inspires us to be an organisation built on compassion, and motivated by love.

Manchester Young Community Champions provides a youth engagement project based at West Gorton Youth Centre 2 evenings a week, working with children and young people with additional needs affecting their mental health and emotional well-being. We provide a safe environment for young people to come and engage with a range of activities and events, enabling them to stay off the streets which helps to reduce anti-social behaviour. The activities we provide are multi-sports, cooking/baking arts and crafts, peer mentor led group sessions, 1-1 sessions, outings and residential trips, and we are reliant on securing funding in order to deliver this service. The areas in Manchester in which we focus are amongst the top 20% of disadvantaged communities in the Country as identified by the Indices of Multiple Deprivation, and a high proportion of our families are on benefits or are on a low income. In Ardwick alone over 50% of young people are in poverty or experience deprivation. (HMRC data report) As a result, members of these communities seek positive outlets for community activity and rely heavily on subsidised public and/or voluntary sector services to maintain their health, emotional well-being and social needs. Given this, we provide our children and young people with either a hot meal or snack during every session, which supports the family budget, and our families rely on this provision. In order for us to continue to provide food to our children and young people, we would like to apply for redistributed food donations from M&S to be received on a regular basis. Since the Coronavirus pandemic, we have been working creatively to continue to engage with and provide for our children and young people, and have done this by delivering food parcels to families on an outreach basis, which has enabled us to ensure that we can still provide meals for our children and young people.