Pret Victoria Street, 95

UOS is a volunteer-led charity that aims to use education, compassion, and collaboration to end homelessness in the UK and beyond. We empower individuals, companies and public organisations to be a part of the change, transforming lives and growing a utopian community, together.

Who are we? Shop and Donate is a UK registered charity (No. 1195163) based in Westminster. It was founded in 2020 during lockdown to meet the needs of residents who were self isolating or struggling to access food. After the pandemic, Shop and Donate has continued its work supporting people affected by the cost of living crisis. Our strategic objectives are: ● Enable food security: by making food accessible to everyone in the local community regardless of their postcode, background or social status. ● Fight food poverty: by supporting the most vulnerable people in the local community as well as those people adversely affected by the cost of living crisis and inflation. ● Tackle food waste: by working with partners, by enabling the redistribution of safe and nutritious food to those who need it. Profits are reinvested back into the community to help local food banks low income families and homebound people How does it work? We are small, locally led and nimble on our feet. We don’t have expensive premises, big donors or consultants. Our volunteers help us every day to run our services. Every penny that we make, is reinvested in the charity or in the local community. We work directly with residents, partnering with other outreach charities that run local services, such as chess clubs, to prevent social isolation. The cost of living crisis has increased demand for our services. We would welcome your help and support by: ● Becoming a corporate partner. ● Selecting Shop & Donate as your charity of the year. ● Giving us a grant or a donation. ● Supporting us through payroll giving. ● Arranging a corporate volunteering day with us. The food donations that we collect are split between our Social Supermarket, our Food Pantry, and with other local charities. Our Food Pantry operates in Victoria, where we offer 10 items for £5.00. Funds from this are reinvested in the cooking classes that we offer and our running costs, and we also plan to garden calles as we are setting up our community garden.

The Club is a registered charity, established 150 years ago, and provides a sense of belonging, fun and informal education to around 700 members each year, where they develop self-confidence, respect for others and build their abilities to contribute to society as good citizens. The Club is in action seven days a week. We have Senior Club programmes Monday – Thursday evenings and Junior Club on Monday and Wednesday evenings; we have Karate Club on Friday and we field football teams on Sundays. In addition, we run programmes during school holidays through the day and into the evenings. In 2016-17 the Club enjoyed 17,806 individual attendances over the year. It has no religious affiliations and is open to all, with members paying only a very modest subscription. The Club is a vital resource for the local community, providing value for money opportunities in a safe, attractive environment for young people to develop educationally, socially and personally through an exciting and remarkably wide range of sport, art, excursions and practical skills. Many of the members live locally in Westminster and come from homes on very tight budgets. We offer a youth development programme to those members keen to take on responsibility and challenges. Many members volunteer and then become youth workers themselves to give back to the Club. Prevention is certainly better than cure and topical issues which affect members’ lives are addressed through workshops, such as gangs and radicalisation, drug prevention, money management, healthy eating, body image and social media bullying.