We Need Your Help with our COVID-19 £15k Emergency Groceries Fund.  
  
These are very challenging times and, following PHE advice, we have suspended all communal eating services and community fundraising events until further notice. 
  
Our kitchen is closed for the moment but our Food Chain staff are working from home. Our strategy is to continue supporting our service users including calling twice a week to check in on them.  As a result of these calls, and from our many new referrals, we have found that many of our service users are self-isolating but have no support and are desperately short of the most essential food supplies. 

  
All our community fundraising events have been cancelled so we have seen an immediate drop in income.  

Our services are needed now more than ever and we have seen a 43% increase in March 2020 compared to February 2020 and a 58% increase comparing March 2019 -2020. 
  
We have put together a basic food hamper that consists of store cupboard essentials, dry goods, long life milk and some healthier ready meals. The cost of this hamper is £45. 

 
Supermarket food deliveries are increasingly difficult to arrange, but we have a number of volunteers who are local to service users and are available to shop and make deliveries.  
£15k would ensure that we can deliver this service for at least 12 weeks.  
 
If you can help out in any way we’d be more than grateful. Any amount, large or small, will be helpful to allow us to continue to feed the fight against HIV and nourish those most in need. Every penny raised from this appeal will be used solely to buy groceries for those most in need. 
  
Thank you.  
  
Siobhàn Lanigan, CEO and The Food Chain staff team