This year, Didcot Mayor Cllr Axel Macdonald will be hosting his Charity Dinner at Didcot Civic Hall on Friday 1 March. The evening will raise funds for two charities close to his heart: the Didcot Food Bank and Felix Fund, the bomb disposal charity.
Cllr Macdonald explains why he has selected these two charities: “Didcot, as many towns, has its less affluent side hence one of my two charities is the Didcot Food Bank. Again, we can aspire to consigning the need for such organisations to the past but at present the Didcot Food Bank is needed more than ever and I am both proud and humbled to be able to support its work throughout my mayoral year. My second charity is also a locally based Didcot charity that works across the UK. The Felix Fund provides care and assistance to serving soldiers and veterans and again I'm proud to be able to support and promote them again as I did ten years ago when I was last Mayor.”
As this is such an important event, we wanted to take the opportunity of providing our readers with information about these two charities which you may like to support in some way.
The community-based Didcot Emergency Foodbank serves people in Didcot and the immediate surrounding villages, providing short term relief by giving good to people in crisis in their local area. The Foodbank is a project run by the Didcot Baptist Church on behalf of the local community. They support nearly 7,500 adults and children (inclusive of repeat visits), providing each family with a food item from a minimum of 20 different food categories according to the family size, including dog/cat food, toiletries, and toilet rolls. The Foodbank located at Didcot Baptist Church, Wantage Road, Didcot is open on Tuesdays and Fridays, from 11 am until 1 pm. People needing to access the Foodbank need to be referred by one of the agencies who work with the Foodbank. You must already have a connection with the referrer or be known to them. Referrers include schools, housing associations, social care departments and various voluntary organisations. Please contact one of these organisations and ask for a Foodbank referral if you are in need. They will either issue you with a voucher or make an email referral.
For the last two years they have been helping a good number of low-income families, week-in week-out, especially during the 10% inflation period. However, this is not sustainable in the long term, so in July they reverted to six weeks maximum referrals followed by a pause of six months; the Foodbank hopes to be in a position to reduce that pause at the end of the 2023 to three months. Their average family size is 3.5 adults and children, and within this figure are single people and families of seven. Councils from Oxford, Reading and elsewhere have placed many families in Didcot social housing during the last two or three years, which has reflected in increased demand for the Foodbank. Ethnicity has included some from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, West Africa, North Africa, Ukraine, Poland, China (Hong Kong), amongst others, which reflects the increasing diversity of the population of Didcot and the surrounding villages.
You can support the Didcot Foodbank by donating items of food which can be left in the collection boxes at both Sainsbury’s branches in Didcot or brought along to the Foodbank when they are open. If neither of these options work for you, please email the Foodbank via foodbank@didcotbaptist.org.uk. A list of the items required can be found on their Facebook page facebook.com/DidcotFoodbank. Alternatively, you can download the ‘Bankthefood’ App and link it to the Didcot Emergency Foodbank.
If you would like to get involved as a volunteer to help, please contact the Foodbank for details. Either call the Church Office on 01235 813187 and leave a message, email the Foodbank or use the contact form on the website. Anyone wishing to make a financial donation can do so by visiting didcotbaptist.org.uk/mission/local-activities via the donation facility and selecting ‘Foodbank’ as your option.
The Mayor’s other chosen charity is the Felix Fund.
Launched in 2011, the Felix Fund bomb disposal charity is based at the Vauxhall Barracks in Didcot. Since then, the charity has distributed over £2m in grants and assistance to the people of the Explosive Ordnance and Disposal (EOD) and Search communities who attend around 2,500 call outs in the UK alone each year.
Early on the charity provided normalisation breaks for hundreds of individuals from EOD & Search teams on their return from Afghanistan and Northern Ireland. These breaks were designed to identify or reduce the impact of mental stress that a high-pressure tour can bring about and consisted of a week’s therapeutic team building activities, discussion groups designed to draw out and share operational experiences and importantly provided the opportunity to regroup and reinforce peer bonds with colleagues who had travelled the same operational journey. The breaks proved vital in identifying and reducing the risk of poor mental health among individuals.
Today Felix Fund still focuses on mental health with its preventative stress training based on mindfulness. These programmes provide serving military with the tools and techniques to recognise warning signs of stress and to be able to develop their ability to relax, clear their minds and focus on positive aspects of their life. This then feeds back into a more productive and positive work and home environment.
Alongside this, Felix Fund continues to provide financial assistance to serving military, veterans and their dependent family members when facing hardship. Beneficiaries rank in their hundreds, but a few key ones stand out from recent months:
- A hand bike for a veteran injured in Iraq.
- Equipment for a former Clearance Diver to care for his tracheostomy.
- Help to furnish a new home for a wife and child fleeing domestic abuse.
- Support for the nursey at Carver Barracks, Wimbish
The support Felix Fund provides is wide ranging and is aimed at a high-profile tri-service community. At its heart is a desire to reduce the mental stress caused by conducting EOD & Search duties. For a small charity, its impact has been significant, and it is cutting edge in the services it provides.
“We are thrilled to have been chosen by the Mayor of Didcot, Axel Macdonald to be one of his charities during his term in office,” says Melanie Moughton, Felix Fund’s CEO.
Further information about Felix Fund can we found at felixfund.org.uk or across various social media platforms.
