Charities never sleep. All this & more went on with Bayside Community Emergency Relief in the past 3 months!
In April, thanks to a generous corporate donation, we were able to move some of our items into a storage area at Wilsons. We had callouts for urgently requested aid for clients of BayCISS & Bayside Council. We also shared information for Connect Health & Community in line with their COVIC plan which we are proud to be a part of.
In May we held our inaugural Thank You Morning Tea for National Volunteer Week. This was held in conjunction with Highett Neighbourhood Community House & Community Bank Highett. During the tea we were presented with a giant cheque for a grant & were proud to be announced as Community Partners with Community Bank Highett. The event included a raffle of 3 amazing hampers & every guest also received a goodie bag full of treat from local traders. We guesstimate approx. $800-$1k in generously donated items were handed out that morning!
Kingston Council also awarded us a grant to help create comfort packs for 2 aged care residences & packing is currently underway for that initiative.
In this busy few months we also announced our Goodwill Ambassador, Channel 9 reporter Mark Santomartino. It’s great to welcome Mark to our superhero community.
We also rallied the community to help with requested items for hundreds of people still living rough after losing everything in the bushfires in Cann River & surrounding areas. Then the floods hit so when we delivered 152 boxes to Cann River we also included items that would go to flood effected families in Sale & Traralgon.
Straight on from that we started collecting requested items for the storm ravaged Dandenongs. This included items that were not being donated by the wider community but they were in desperate need of. Our wonderful sewers sprung into action our making wildlife pouches & the community were encouraged to make tax deductible monetary donations so we could purchase more items for effected families & injured wildlife.
The staff at Ella_Bache_Hampton attended a packing session for pre schooler comfort packs for children fleeing domestic violence and we have also had a pre assembly sorting session for our next massive round of packs that are currently underway.
Along the way our sensational community have been busy making hand made cards with words of encouragement in them to go into our children fleeing domestic violence packs. We’ve also had an amazing amount of drawstring bags made which will last us a few rounds of pack making! Our brilliant community plus a few supporting charities & schools are also creating some gorgeous handmade soft toys, pencil cases & period packs for our domestic violence packs.
Our next quarter is also super busy. The next requested round of with domestic violence packs are currently underway, our HUGE annual online auction fundraiser is in August & a few more reallllly exciting announcements still to come!
Please spread the word & invite your friends & colleagues to our fabulous group. The more members we have, the more we can help those in need.
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