Projects

A short time after the COVID-19 pandemic closed down Make Lunch, we span up our Food Parcel project to be able to deliver weekly food parcels to Make Lunch families and others (depending on capacity) initially for May – July inclusive. We’re working in partnership with the Salvation Army in the city centre who are kindly offering their city centre café to us for storing and refrigerating food that is supplied to us from Fareshare South West. Waitrose have also generously donated bags and some ambient food. Every week we have a team of volunteers who pack and prepare the food parcels, and drivers who deliver this lifeline to families in Bath.

It has been going really well and we're delivering parcels to nearly 30 families each week. We're expecting this to gradually increase over the next few weeks as we receive more referrals, and we'll be able to help up to 50 families up until the end of July. We have had a fantastic response to an appeal for donations, hitting our £2000 target in no time and now reaching more than £4000 with 50 supporters.

Please do get in touch with us at makelunch@oasisbath.org if you would like to join us as a volunteer!

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.

We host Coffee with Cops… getting local residents together with the police to discuss the issues that matter in the local community. Check our Facebook page for details of the next event, or email us at welcome@oasisbath.org

The scale of holiday hunger is huge, with over 1.5 million children receiving Free School Meals and millions 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. You can watch one of our Make Lunch founders giving a talk about the project at TEDx Bath here.

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

At Oasis Bath, we take the current climate emergency very seriously. At some of our Sunday meetings we help each other to discuss and live out a more environmental lifestyle, hear about a local area collaboration (CAFE BANES – Christian Action For the Environment) and think about activism with the Keynsham plastic attack and #YouthStrike4Climate. We’re also proud to host Extinction Rebellion for their weekly meetings.