How it all started
In 2015, I was shopping with my schoolteacher daughter to buy Christmas gifts.
This was for a local initiative called The Jessie Tree, which provided, via donations, Christmas presents for children whose families budgets were stretched to their very limits.
What really shook me and still does, was that her ‘Gift’ list included pieces of school uniform.
Don’t suppose it’s too difficult to explain how it felt, knowing that there were children getting up on Christmas morning to open Christmas presents … and find nothing more than bits of school uniform!
It was heart-breaking and so very wrong.
Couldn’t get this out of my head throughout the whole of that Christmas holiday. Over the next few weeks and months this tiny nugget of an idea evolved … we could work in the same way as Food Banks.
But instead of buying groceries and tins of food, people could pick up a pack of shirts or a pair of trousers or a schoolbag … and so was established the first Back to School Bank.
