There have been lots of exciting things happening at our music project this past month!
Sarah Wake-Bennet, our Mayor, was at the building on Monday the 10th of May. A group of our primary school age young people prepared a performance for her on ukulele, piano and percussion. We thanked her for supporting Cre8 and young people gave her a tour of our facilities.
Since lockdown restrictions have eased, we have opened up music for young people to attend the full 2 hour sessions Mon, Wed and Fri. In April, we had 23 individual young people coming along for musical activities and we anticipate this number rising as we have significant interest in people joining in with group music sessions as clubs are planning to reopen. We continue to deliver 1 to 1 tutor lessons to those interested in learning an instrument.
We have expressed an interest in the next round of funding for the music project and are hopeful we will get a positive response on 11th June. Outreach sessions are going well, giving the opportunity for local young people to express their talents. We are also now working with Cre8 grocery to provide free healthy after school snacks and drinks for our participants.
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Social Enterprise PPHT Van Washing
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Our Social Enterprise Project has recently been able to team up with Peaks and Plains Housing Trust for a washing service of their fleet of vehicles. Our first washing session was a great success, we were able to get their vans sparkling clean! Also with this project we were able to offer work experience to one of our young people. We look forward to doing more with PPHT in the future!
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As lockdown begins to ease, now is a great time to reflect on our Grocery and how it has grown, and done so well to support the community over the past year.
For the 19 weeks of lockdown 1 - from March to July 2020 we delivered 1591 food hampers to households across Macclesfield. That's around 422 different households. People requested food from a variety of different backgrounds and areas and for different reasons, including no income due to loss of job / lockdown, supporting another household so resources were stretched, isolation, health / shielding / felt unable to go out, no friends or family to support etc. Our food collection in lockdown was around 2 - 2.5 tonnes of food per week. Lots of waste food from the hospitality industry, or offices/canteens being closed at short notice. We were also in receipt of emergency food through Defra and Fareshare.
We also helped to delivery homemade meals cooked by the Hope Centre to the Hotel where Cheshire East Council were providing temporary housing for those who were homeless during first lockdown. We went most evenings 7 days a week from March to end of May 2020.
We provided weekly food hampers to residents in Hostels run by partner agencies Emerging Futures. We took referals from partner organisations such as Cheshire East Council People Helping People, Probation, CGL, Hope Centre, HTH Church, The Core on the Upton, Ash Grove school etc and provided food hampers, as well as referring to Silklife Foodbank for those in crisis.
We helped to set up the Food Partners Network weekly meeting with the Hope in NE Cheshire, to ensure we were all covering the gaps and not duplicating work in terms of charitable food. This is still continuing.
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The Grocery itself re-opened for people to come and collect surplus food from us from the beginning of May 2020 (we closed mid-March 2020 and did home delivery).
Since we re-opened in May 2020, up to the end of March 2021, we have opened the Grocery 119 times and provided 6,641 household food collections (each household collects 3 bags of food, so that's 19,923 bags of food we've packed!)
In November 2020 we opened a pop-version of the Grocery in partnership with the Green in the Corner Cafe at Hurdsfield.
Our average number of visitors at each opening of the Grocery (currently open 3 times per week, once at Hurdsfield and twice at St Barnabas) is around 70 people. Each receives around £20 of 'surplus' food - donated from shops / restaurants / supermarkets / schools / charities etc that is 'surplus' to requirements and would likely have been thrown. We collect around 1.8 tonnes of food a week from various places across Macclesfield and also collect from Fareshare in Manchester.
We now have around 10 volunteers at each opening plus other supporting collecting food and sorting throughout the week.
Its been an eventful year, and we look forward to how the Grocery is going to progress over the rest of 2021 and beyond!
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Our Cre8 2021 Annual Report is now out! We've worked hard to produce this over the past year, and we are really happy with the final result. To read it, and see our previous annual reports, head on over to our website or click here.
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A Huge Thank You from Cre8
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All of us here at Cre8 would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has supported and donated to us over the past year. We try our hardest to thank each person who gives to our projects, however sometimes this isn't possible. Rest assured, every single donation means a great deal to us, and we cannot say thank you enough. Big or small, every little makes a difference.
Thank you to our Cre8 family for your amazing support, even in difficult times. We appreciate each and every one of you.
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