Support from businesses critical to Helping Hands

Volunteers and organisations powered by volunteers do an incredible amount of good across Warwickshire every hour of every day. But those organisations also need support - and many simply could not exist without the generosity of the business community. Leamington Spa-based charity Helping Hands, which does wonderful work primarily with the homeless, is a prime example but their relationship with businesses is very much a two-way street, as Helping Hands chief executive Lianne Kirkman explains.

 Ever since Helping Hands was formed, seven years ago, we have always had great support from the business community. The services we run, mainly the soup kitchen and house-to-home project, are mostly delivered by our wonderful volunteers but it is safe to say that, without the support of businesses small and large across Warwickshire, there would be no services to run.

It is amazing and quite humbling to see, even in the current very tough economic climate, businesses doing all they can to help us help people who desperately need support. And it is interesting to see that more and more in the last year we are also saying to businesses, 'how can we help you?'

A lot of work that we do at Helping Hands is around mental health and there are many recent examples of us showing businesses how they can improve their support for their workforce. We help them understand that someone on their team might have issues of mental health or domestic abuse or family breakdown which are all components that can lead to homelessness and ending up in our soup kitchen. It's fantastic to see more businesses now putting greater value on looking after their employees and we are proud to be able to help them do that.

It's very much a two-way relationship but I can only say the biggest possible thank you to all the businesses who have supported us over the seven years . I think what people like about Helping Hands is it's directness - if you come to us, you can get involved and straight away actually see the benefit of what you are bringing. Sometimes we get a phone call from a business with a CSR volunteer day coming up and they will say, 'we've got 14 people - what can you do with them?' So we offer a range of projects, for teams of eight and sometimes for all 14. They can assist with our House to Home programme or do a Soup Kitchen Takeover which is really popular. We often ask them to do a Soup Kitchen Takeover at the start because it gets them right into the heart of what we do.

Sometimes a business will say, 'we've got £1,000 - what are you going to do with it?' So they might do a Warehouse Takeover whereby we have a list of families we are helping, maybe a single parent with one child or a family of four, and we create a business bathroom and bedroom pack. We get together some basics - a microwave, new bedsheets - and put them in one of our community boxes which will have the sponsor's name on it so when the people open it in their new home it says this is a gift from whoever.

It's about so much more than donating money. It's also about sharing skills. We talk to businesses about how they can support what we do...with our marketing perhaps because we have only one fundraiser whereas a big business might have 20. The financial support we receive is obviously very important but the skills support is also priceless.

Covid was tough for us, as it was for so many, because we couldn't fundraise and the corporates couldn't either, but businesses are still saying they want to help and that's testament to their kindness and generosity. We have really small, one-person businesses who put money into us every month and then we have giants like Aston Martin and Calor Gas who give us brilliant support, so we have the whole scope covered.

So many business quietly support us year after year and don't ever expect anything in return. Our soup kitchen serves excellent, nutritious meals because of our brilliant donors. Aubrey Allen's meat donations and vegetables from Hinton's in Warwick. Hinton's recently came to us and asked, what veg do you want us to plant over winter? That's just fantastic. Peach Pubs give us 50 meals each week. Gregg's have been with us since day one of this journey. Our food suppliers are amazing...though we always need more.

We especially more need in light of the recession and with winter coming on and we are looking to expand what we do to meet the demand. We're going to go out in our van to deprived areas where we can park up and say 'come and get a hot meal.' That way we can reach more people and maybe refer them to other services they might need.

We're hoping to get the van out into the community this winter though what we desperately need is a big container to help us with storage. Any business, a construction company, maybe, or farm, which might have a spare container, 20ft or 40ft, lying around please let us know!

The business community of Warwickshire never lets us down and we are truly thankful for every single bit of their support.