Commonside Trust depends on charitable grants and donations from individuals and corporate sponsors. With an annual expenditure of between £400,000 and £450,000, we spend a lot of time writing bids and proposals and seeking new sources of funding. We try to be as creative and positive as possible in doing this, which isn’t always easy as often we are supporting people in dire situations who have lost all hope. We are not a glamourous charity, but we are a decent hardworking one.
How your money is used
If you give us £2, we might buy fresh bread and milk for families who come in to use the food bank. Food bank items are canned or dried only so we add these fresh items ourselves. We might use it to top up someone’s Oyster card so that they can attend the health appointment at the hospital that they have been waiting for.
If you give us £250, we could probably squeeze a coach trip to the seaside out of it. We organised a trip to Folkestone in August 2019, for families with children with disabilities or long-term health conditions who would not otherwise have gone away at all during the six weeks of the school holidays, as well as some adults who had not been away on any kind of a break for years.
If we can raise the total of £1,000 from sponsors and supporters, we use this for things like after-school cooking classes for children, cooking utensils for the Lunch Club and seeds, plants and fencing for our outdoor fruit and veg plot.
In 2019, our lovely friends at Paul Strank Charitable Trust gave us £2,500 for our summer fun day for local people. This provided a whole day of fun activities for local people from all walks of life who could afford a holiday in the summer months. With this funding we paid for the veggie and meat BBQs, visiting donkeys, a bouncy castle, candy floss, a toy tombola and much, much more and we had Radio Jackie broadcast from our fun day for the whole afternoon: Pollards Hill Family Fun Day 2019
Haven’t got a penny?
Can you help us as a volunteer? See our volunteer page here. Can you donate good quality children’s clothes or toys, or adult clothes suitable for a job interview? If you can, we can give these to people who need them and/or sell them at a reasonable price on our weekly fundraising stall at our Friday market. Ring 020 8764 9582 x 208 for a chat.
Thank you!
