Brynmawr Rotary supporting community with help from the youngsters

Brynmawr Rotary set up a telephone call system in March when the start of the coronavirus pandemic began in the UK. The system was there for people who were stuck inside their homes without regular contact or just wanted to hear another voice. It also provided a way for the senior members of the Rotary to continue their ‘service’ and make a difference to someone’s day.

Some of the donations from Brynmawr Rotary

Some of the donations.

The younger members of the Rotary began helping out in various other ways by joining the many ‘help’ groups in the area – providing shopping and delivering prescriptions. They also would use their hour outside to walk dogs if people were unable to take their pets out due to shielding or isolating.

Within a week of all this beginning, Brynmawr Rotary put together the Stronger Together Project, which also saw friends of the Rotary and other members of the community get involved.

Three new community members, Michelle Hurter, Wayne Hodgins and Anne Baker joined the Rotary to help their communities. The three of them, alongside Donna Wallbank led The Brynmawr Rotary Supplementary Foodbank. It was only meant to help Brynmawr, Nantyglo and Blaina but quickly grew to cover the whole of Blaenau Gwent, providing support to the traditional foodbanks.

MORE NEWS:

• We're in it Together: The community heroes who stepped up during the pandemic
• We're in it Together: Full list of support services across Gwent
• Welsh Government won't set vaccination targets as they 'do more harm than good' says Gething

The Rotary foodbank project worked with groups who made direct contact for support and would deliver immediately to the point of need each day, even when the traditional foodbanks were closed. During this, the Brynmawr Rotary still continued their support of the Trussell Trust foodbank at Tabor Church.

In November, the group held a meeting to discuss the needs around Christmas. They asked the Rotary friends to support them with 50 hampers, via fundraising and raising awareness. The community got behind this and within two weeks, they had doubled their initial hamper target. During the second week of December, this rose to 130. However, by December 19, they had 145 families but not enough to cover all of them.

The community came together again and just three days later on December 22, they were able to provide not only the hampers for the 145 families, but a further 39 – bringing the total to 184 hampers for across Blaenau Gwent.

Each of the hampers contained full bags of fruit and vegetables, a chicken, cheese, bacon, sausages, treats and store cupboard necessities for the Christmas week. They also provided an extra 100 fruit and vegetable bags for a different group who provided their community with dried food hampers.

119 children were also able to receive a bag of gifts and selection boxes after donations from the community and the Thomas Carroll Group in Caerphilly.

The Brynmawr Rotary have been really humbled by the generosity from people within and outside of Blaenau Gwent, showing that the community is stronger when they come together.

The Rotary also want to highlight how their young people stepped in with the management of the hampers. On December 19, a number of the adult volunteers had to be stood down due to the restrictions that were imposed by the Welsh Government. But the family bubbles of young people who had been working with their parents and grandparents, stepped up to the task to carry on the fantastic work already started.