OPEN NOW !  a food donation point at St. John's.

A container for your donations is in the Church Porch, which is currently open on Sundays and Wednesdays (11am to 5pm).

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For some years a number of St. John's parishioners have actively supported the NORTH GUILDFORD FOOD BANK which operates out of St.Clare's at Park Barn and serves those in need in Bellfields, Merrow and Park Barn. We've recently discovered that there is no collection point for donations in Merrow. The nearest is probably Sainsbury's at Burpham.

There's an increasing number of families finding it difficult to keep hunger at bay as the pandemic hits earning power and job security of so many people across Guildford. This report we have just received from the Food Bank team paints a drastic picture:

"As you can imagine, it's been an extremely busy time for us over the past 9 months, and we have had to be agile about amending our processes to carry on providing food throughout. Thanks to a huge team of very dedicated volunteers, and to generous donors, we have been able to continue seamlessly, and in fact have been able to be more generous in our parcels so that they last for closer to a week Demand for parcels was huge at the beginning of lockdown when we were giving out more than 3 times our pre-Covid average. Since then, things have calmed down with other projects around the town which were put in place, so that in general we've been about 2 times busier than usual.

Over Christmas we organised and put together a special additional bag for each household, filled with Christmas goodies donated by local schools, businesses, community groups, churches & individuals. We were also able to include a supermarket voucher for everyone in these bags (giving out a total of just over £5,000) - which clients have been hugely grateful for. We delivered 234 food parcels, almost three times as many as the previous Christmas."

So we are setting up a donation point at St. John's.

As you pass by on your exercise breaks or whatever, please pop an item or two of non-perishable food stuff in the container. Typical gifts could be tinned soup, tinned rice pudding, fruit juice, washing up liquid - anything non-perishable will be welcome. We will take the donations each Monday to the Food Bank's distribution centre.

Simple as that. But what a need we will be helping with; trying to make sure no-one goes hungry. God bless all you givers.

Any queries to Robert Avis  robertavis@raavis.plus.com