MK Soup Runners

Archive for the ‘Stantonbury Group’ Category

Come and experience life on the streets

What is it like to be homeless and jobless without hope – especially during the cold winter months?

•  How do the homeless end up in that situation?
•  How and why do they end up jobless?
•  What hope is there for them?
•  What help is there for them when all official channels fail?

Contrary to popular belief it is often not all their own fault when someone loses their home, their job, their dignity and possibly worst of all, their self belief and hope for the future.

Churches in the Stantonbury Ecumenical Partnership have teams working with the Milton Keynes Soup Run. Come rain or shine, snow or sun, on four evenings a week members hand out soup, hot drinks and sandwiches to the city’s most vulnerable.

You can find out more about the Soup Run, at a special service being held at Bradwell Church, Vicarage Road, Bradwell Village, on Sunday January 15 at 6pm.

This service, lasting no more than three quarters of an hour, promises to open your eyes and ears to the very real problem of homelessness in our city. Please come and hear what the volunteers from the Soup Run have experienced.

To get you in the right frame of mind Soup Run members will be serving soup, hot drinks and sandwiches – outside the church – before the service begins.

We are delighted to welcome Tea Monkey in Central Milton Keynes to our list of sponsors.

They join Pret a Manger in donating sandwiches and other goodies to the various Soup Runs in Milton Keynes on a daily basis.

Also in January 2012, the Christ Church Kitchen has been revamped and the running has been taken over by McIntyre Organisation who have kindly allowed the Monday and Tuesday run to use their excellent facilities.

A big thank you to both for their support.

It seems like an additional Soup Run on Tuesday evenings is about to happen at last.
Over the past few months we have had lots of interest from other groups which, sadly, didn’t actually come to anything.
However, the interest from Bradwell Church (St Lawrence to most of us still..) has meant that additional volunteers have come forward and a new team is working towards a start date of 6th July.
Primarily, they will work from Christ Church Stantonbury Kitchens and use the existing materials from the Monday Group.

Other changes to the organisation will mean that the whole team will  be working under the Stantonbury Ecumenical Partnership banner – we have a Mission Statement and everything !!
We are fortunate that we have a regular core of helpers each week with others volunteering as convenient, so we are not currently recruiting new volunteers but if you would like to register your interest in volunteering please use the contact form and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Mondays evening stops at the Library have restarted this week, almost by accident.

We were passing the Library and spotted a couple of lads looking hopeful, so swung in to see if they were expecting\hoping that someone would be along. We had been warned that there were some new people around at this venue so it’s good that we have been able to make contact and reinstate this stop

After over a year of being involved with the weekly soup runs, and having only missed a couple of Mondays, we have at last found Wolfie, sitting happily in his shelter reading the paper and enjoying a Christmas beverage.

We were beginning to believe that he was a figment of all our imaginations, or a PR exercise to make Milton Keynes a more interesting place by adding local colourful characters..

We can now tick the box in our wish list and be happy that we weren’t leaving food for the hamsters.