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The SVP Team is as busy as ever, but with your support, we know we can maintain the pace! And knowing that the work is ultimately guided by the Holy Spirit, and is done in unison with our global Vincentian family, is a real energiser too.

To get an idea of the reach of the global SVP why not visit the global web site. You’ll quickly get an appreciation of the legacy that Blessed Frederic Ozanam left us. As a 20-year-old student in the Sorbonne he must really have had a sense of needing to use his gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit for the betterment of those around him. His legacy is now at work in 155 countries, through 800,000 members. Those are impressive figures!

Last weekend the clocks ‘fell back’ and this heralded the season of darker evenings. It is timely, then, to remind you of one of the core missions of the SVP: to visit the lonely.

Visits can be in the home, care homes, hospitals, prisons, detention centres, or simply greeting a person on the street with a friendly ‘Hello’. Loneliness can be easily masked by the person suffering, so perhaps you could just ask the Holy Spirit for guidance and you’ll be in wonder and awe of the response!

Last Saturday evening, seven hardy B-Attitudes, safeguarded by two equally-hardy SVP members, slept overnight in the back garden of the church hall. This event, combined with their cake sale after masses last weekend, was to raise some funds for Homeless-related needs and for some Christmas presents for the residents of Brackenbridge House care home.

The B-Attitudes and SVP teams would like to say a huge ‘Thank You’ for all your support and generosity, as a result of which they raised an amazing sum of £593.00! You can rest assured that these funds will now be used to top up our stock of homeless items, such as warm gloves, socks, thermals, sleeping bags and the like, as well as buying some special Christmas gifts for those in Brackenbridge House.

It should be no surprise that good always triumphs over adversity, but it is easy to forget this when we are surrounded by so much negative news, such as the recent civil unrest.

One example of good is that this civil unrest made us sit up and re-evaluate our various workstreams, particularly our food bank. Even though we have been operating it since 2016, we have always tweaked it to suit prevailing conditions. We did this most dramatically in March 2020 when the Covid-19 lockdowns first started, when we ran all operations outdoors and with a much-reduced team of volunteers serving an increasing number of clients.

It’s always encouraging to know that someone reads our SVP News item each week! On Monday evening we held our monthly meeting and it was lovely to welcome two new members to the team, following our recent news item seeking new joiners! This really increases the resilience of the team and gives us the capacity to spread the load.

There is still plenty of space for more new members though, so please just get in touch if you are interested. And particularly so if you are gifted with communication skills in Arabic, Farsi, Polish, Ukrainian or Romanian. We need such skills at our food bank each Saturday and you can just imagine what it would mean to a client whose first language is not English.