A Dozen Days of generosity in Shenfield

Posted on January 6, 2023, by Nicola Lighterness

Another year has passed and a new year has started, and with it, one of our most ambitious Blue Sheriff charity campaigns has come to an end. When we started this year’s campaign, A Dozen Days of Donations in aid of the Daily Bread Cafe, we could never have imagined the positive response we’d receive from the businesses in Shenfield. With our move to Shenfield, we have acquired the most generous of neighbours. And we’d like to say a huge thank you to all who have taken part!

A Dozen Days of Donations

As 2022 saw us spending our first Christmas in our new home at the Shenfield Create Hub, we wanted to support a Shenfield based charity. With this in mind, we chose to support the Daily Bread Café through our Dozen Days of Donations. As is our tradition, each Christmas, rather than send Christmas cards, we like to help our local community, with the assistance of our cheeky little colleague and company mascot, The Blue Sheriff.

Our Dozen Days of Donations was designed to support the essential work of the Daily Bread Café in Hutton. Established in 2018, The Daily Bread Café supports people at crisis point who need food and other items urgently and, sadly, the organisation is seeing a big increase in demand as the cost of living crisis escalates.

Of course being the creative beings that we are, our own donations were all centred around the 12 Days of Christmas, and it was great fun thinking of food items which related to the famous Christmas song. Disco crisps for nine ladies dancing, anyone?

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A dozen generous Shenfield Businesses

As well as having fun coming up with tins of tuna for seven swans a-swimming and bags of popcorn for ten lords a-leaping for our own donation, we wanted to get to know our new neighbours, both within the Create Hub and in wider Shenfield, too. As such, we put the call out to ask our fellow Shenfield based businesses if they too could give a donation to help The Daily Bread Café.

Twelve very generous Shenfield businesses stepped forward, one per day from 1^st – 12^th December, and donated much-needed items to this very worthy cause. With this in mind, we need to say a huge thank you to the following companies:

Thank you all so much for your generosity; from toiletries to treats, dinner essentials to dessert items, every single one of the items collected by yourselves and your kind hearted teams was very much appreciated by The Daily Bread Café.

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Spreading some Christmas cheer with A Dozen Days of Donations

What started as our annual charity campaign, where we had merely hoped to receive a positive response from other businesses in the area soon snowballed into our biggest charity campaign to date. Approximately 800 items were donated, with an estimated value over £1000.

What does this look like in real terms? For key items, it approximately looks as follows:

243 tins of food
2km of spaghetti
5kgs of pasta
2km of toilet roll
2520 cups of tea and coffee
And, of course, 980 biscuits

This is just a few of the facts and figures, in addition to this, we also received items such as treats, sweets, cooking oil, cleaning products, and toiletries.

On top of this, it was great for the Blue Serif team to all get involved with the campaign, from collecting the items from the various Shenfield businesses, through to photographing and sharing on social media, and, most importantly, delivering the items to The Daily Bread Café; a very much humbling experience for all of us.

Seeing the work of The Daily Bread Café first-hand has really reinforced to us how valuable the work is that the charity provides, not just in terms of the food hub but also all of the other services provided at St. Peter’s Church in Hutton; these include dementia and mental health support groups, benefit advice and / or simply company for those who are feeling alone.

Thank you to each and every one of the very many wonderful Shenfield businesses who got involved with The Blue Sheriff’s Dozen Days of Donations; we couldn’t have envisaged such a fantastic response to our call to help others, and it has meant so much to us to be able to spread a little bit of cheer this Christmas.