Argos Leigh (Inside Sainsbury's)

The Bridge at Leigh is a registered charity with a Community Food Shop/Pantry. Our mission is to reduce food waste, food poverty and social isolation. Tonnes of good food is wasted every year and at the same time people are struggling to afford to eat. . We source this surplus food from supermarkets and other food producers The food we collect is offered in our Food Shop to members of the Leigh and wider community struggling to make ends meet. People who want to use our Community Food Shop become a member of The Bridge, membership is is open to everyone there is no criteria to join. Food is then available for members to choose a basket of food for a small amount. We have bread and other daily items offered FREE to our members and we also help out people in crisis who are referred to us. We need volunteers to help us save food and change lives in our community. We rely on donations to keep The Bridge at Leigh running and continue to support those most in need. We value donations in money. time and skills. It’s not just about the food though, we offer advice, support, wellbeing and inclusion. In partnership with Brook Housing we offer supported accommodation to help people move on with their lives. Building Bridges to a better future.

The Homeless Support Project is a Registered Charity, constituted in September 2016 to ‘prevent or relieve poverty in Wigan and Leigh … providing support, food and shelter to people who are homeless or … in need.’ With an open-access kitchen and charity shop in the heart of Leigh (one of the 10% most deprived areas in England), we are a lifeline for local vulnerable people providing two free-of-charge meals a day, five days a week, (7 days during Oct to March). Most service users are homeless either sleeping rough or sofa surfing, or facing homelessness. Some have alcohol or drug dependencies, many have (often unsupported) mental health challenges. Well-known locally as Helping Support People (HSP) our service users can self-refer, may be recommended to contact us by friends, or are referred by healthcare or other professionals. We support everyone with empathy and compassion and without judgment; many service users say we feel like their only hope. Our main aim is to support every service user along the journey to regaining as much independence as possible with our person-centred wraparound services, recognising that this will be at a unique pace for each individual, and that their aspirations will be different and may change with time. Trust is vital to our long-term relationship with service users, they come to us feeling abandoned, excluded, disillusioned, suspicious of authority and reluctant to engage. Service users take time to trust us: each is enabled to do this at their own pace, some will attend for meals and a warm, safe space to be in, others will later engage with one or more of the support services on offer from us or our partners. With 25% of our volunteers being ex-service users with lived-experience of homelessness we offer understanding and empathy, and the belief that personal circumstances can improve. Life-changing services are provided to some of the most vulnerable people in Wigan Borough by our experienced and dedicated staff and volunteers. The breadth of our support has grown since we were set up in 2016 in response to evidenced need of increasing homelessness and food poverty, both in numbers of free-of-charge meals provided every weekday, and in the extent of partnerships to bring much needed healthcare, housing, and other services into our premises for service users to access. Our services are used by those who are not able to afford to use pay-for foodbanks, and who need longer term support and access to wraparound services for complex issues. We now have 986 service users who regularly access our support, an increase of 150.5% in the last 12 months. Every weekday our staff and volunteers provide two hot meals (lunch and afternoon meal) free to service users in our open-access kitchen in Charles Street in Leigh town centre. Wigan Council has funded our temporary provision of weekend meals for 26 weeks from October 2024, helping us to support service users seven days a week.