Every Christmas, Oasis Church Bath runs ‘Give a Gift’, a reverse advent calendar where we collect items that are then distributed between a number of projects, including Make Lunch (our holiday hunger programme). We know that these hampers are always really appreciated by the families who receive them, and the feedback we get each year is that people are overwhelmed by the generosity they experience.

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Coffee with Cops brings police officers and the community members they serve together over coffee to discuss issues and learn more about each other. We host regular Coffee with Cops sessions where anyone who would value an informal conversation with a police officer is welcome to come along. We provide the coffee...and usually cake too! If you'd like to know when our next Coffee with Cops session is keep an eye on our social media pages, or email us at welcome@oasisbath.org.

We're proud to be home to Focus Counselling, who have been delivering affordable counselling in Bath for over 20 years. Focus work with GP surgeries, drugs and alcohol agencies, housing associations, schools, universities, the police, social services and other counselling agencies to name but a few, but offer counselling to all and have funding available for those who are on a low income. Focus see over 100 clients each week in both Bath and Frome, where they have recently opened a new practice. They work with children, young people and adults. The staff team now numbers 22 and all Focus counsellors are professionally trained to Diploma level or above, regularly supervised and enjoy ongoing supervision and professional development. To find out more about Focus you can visit their website at www.focusbath.com.

Through our partnerships with Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, Oasis Church Bath is home to six different addiction support groups. AA and NA provide a range of peer led support for addicts at different stages of their recovery. We offer our building at a significantly discounted rate, without which many of the meetings we host would close down.

Quartet Community Foundation's recent 'Vital Signs' report reveals a 25% increase in drug use in BANES, and the need to focus on early intervention and prevention. Groups such NA and AA help people who are recovering from addiction stay clean and sober, and provide them with the support they need to stop them from going back in active addiction.

To find out more about how to access a meeting and when the meetings run, please visit the relevant website below; Narcotics Anonymous Alcoholics Anonymous

The Oasis Pantry is one of a growing number of community pantries opening in Bath, supplying low cost, high quality surplus food each week to local residents.  We’re partnering with Fareshare Southwest, who match up surplus, in-date food with individuals and families on low incomes.   Our Pantry will be open every Thursday from 2pm-4pm in the ground floor of Oasis Church Bath, from Thursday 10th September 2020.  If you live or work within approximately a 15 minute walk of Oasis, or if Oasis is your closest Pantry, and your household income is less than £18,000 a year, then we’d love to invite you to become a member.  All are welcome, and we particularly would like to encourage those who are lone parents or families, who are long term unemployed, from refugees / asylum seekers and immigrants, and anyone working with a support service, eg. Social workers.  (more…)

A short time after the COVID-19 pandemic meant we couldn't run our holiday hunger project Make Lunch, we quickly adapted and set up our Food Parcel Project. Between April - August we delivered over 700 food parcels to Make Lunch families and others referred to us by community and statutory organisations. We worked in partnership with the Salvation Army in the who kindly offered us their city centre café for storing and refrigerating food that is supplied to us from Fareshare South West.

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In the UK, 4 million children are living in shoe poverty.This means that they are often wearing shoes that don’t fit properly or aren’t suitable for their needs. Through our existing community work we had many conversations with parents who struggle to provide school shoes for their children, with new shoes costing around £50 a pair in Clarks, and only lasting a few months as children often grow quickly. Despite this need, around 2 million shoes are sent to landfill every single week in the UK, with each pair taking 100 years to biodegrade.

In response, Oasis Hub Bath piloted a school shoes redistribution project for the first time in 2019. Through partnering with local schools, churches and community groups as well as the local media, we put out a call for donations of good quality second hand or new school news to redistribute to families in need rather than ending up in landfill.

We collected over 70 pairs of shoes which were cleaned, polished and prepared for redistribution by a group of volunteers. We partnered with three local schools to distribute vouchers to families that would benefit from receiving a pair of school shoes, then set up a school shoes stall at the summer fairs of each school. We managed to give away 52 pairs of shoes, and any shoes we had left at the end were given to a clothing project, meaning every pair of donated shoes reached a family in need.

 

The scale of holiday hunger is huge, with over 1.2 million children receiving Free School Meals and several million more children living in poverty. It poses an urgent question. What happens to the children in your community during the thirteen weeks of the school holidays? For too many, the food runs out. We run Make Lunch – a food related initiative aiming to reduce holiday hunger by offering free nutritious meals to children and their families in the school holidays.  We started in 2016, and the level of poverty and need has increased significantly since then.  We run holiday clubs for primary aged children and their families in three different locations of the city - Twerton, Southdown and the city centre in each of the school holidays throughout the year.  Each session includes a hot, 2-course meal and a number of enrichment activities. (more…)

We run a Kinship Carers' Support Group with help from BANES Family Placement Team. Kinship care is ‘when a child lives full-time or most of the time with a relative or friend who isn't their parent, usually because their parents aren't able to care for them’. (source: Grandparents plus). There are around 200,000 children in the UK living in kinship care, and approximately 100 kinship carers in BANES. Research shows that around half of children (52%) are in kinship care as a result of parental drug or alcohol misuse, although other reasons include bereavement, imprisonment, parental abuse or neglect and parental ill health. Almost half of children in kinship care have some kind of special needs (49%), most commonly emotional and behavioural difficulties. Despite these complex needs kinship carers often don’t receive the same level of support as foster carers, so our monthly support group provides an important service and enables kinship carers to access vital peer support, as well as being able to talk with social care and be signposted to relevant support and resources. If you'd like to attend the kinship carers group please email us at welcome@oasisbath.org