Hampers help the homeless
A city charity will mark its fifth year of helping homeless people with its annual hamper collection.
Helping Hearts Outreach For Wolverhampton & South Staffordshire is a group of volunteers who come together each week to clothe, feed and help homeless people across Wolverhampton.
The charity marks each Christmas by collecting and distributing hampers full of essential items to people in need living on the streets and in hostel accommodation.
Helping Hearts founder Zara Sands spent Christmas Eve delivering the hampers and said it was all about helping people, even during a health crisis.
She said: “Even during the pandemic, I’ve still been out on the streets supporting the people who are out there, donating food and hot drinks to them.
“Members of my team and I were out on Christmas Eve, handing out gift bags with sandwiches and other things in them, then we delivered the hampers to hostels as a lot of our guys were put into one.”
The 36-year-old said around 50 hampers had been prepared with cereals, bread, vegetables, coffee and tea and a number of household items and toiletries.
The hampers were distributed to Jericho House and P3 hostels across Wolverhampton, with volunteers David and Sue Washington and Christine Davies helping Mrs Sands to pick up from Lidl and Aldi in Essington Coppice Farm.
Mrs Sands said it had been harder to do the Christmas hampers due to the pandemic, with more families saying that they were struggling, but said the charity was still able to help as many people as it could.
She said: “It means a lot to me to be able to still run this service and help the people my team and I can help as I think the world of all the people we help.
“One of the lads who was recently rehomed came to us and said he wouldn’t know what he would have done without our help and couldn’t thank us enough, which is really humbling.”
To find out more about Helping Hearts, go to facebook.com/groups/1166800456768569/
