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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.

‘Tis funny how Life is now categorised into pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. Habits and daily routines have certainly changed. Our food bank is just one small example: Pre-pandemic we would normally have seen at each session, say, 10 clients and would have had plenty of time to chat and get to know them. Our new normal is now between 80 and 90 clients on a typical Saturday!

This brings challenges and exposes weaknesses. Probably our biggest weakness at the moment is our lack of language skills. Are you able to communicate in Arabic, Farsi, Polish, Ukrainian or Romanian? And would you like to volunteer at our food bank? You do not need to commit to every Saturday, but if you could help out, even a little, then that would be a huge help to our clients, and to us! Why not have a think and then just reach out to us! We’d love to hear from you.

Have you ever browsed the national SVP website? If you can, why not pay it a visit sometime and you’ll get a lovely flavour of all the different areas that the SVP covers. Whether it be advocating for Social Justice at government level, helping the most vulnerable at community level or linking with our brothers and sisters in need overseas you will see the real evidence of the Holy Spirit turning concern into action.