Words by Smiley Team
The pandemic has made the future of many businesses uncertain, with many already having closed. To help the situation, John Lyon’s Charity pledged support to the London Community Response Fund, ring-fencing half a million pounds to emergency funding to help local charities who can, in turn, help local people.
One of the organisations the charity funds is The Kid’s Cookery School, who shifted its focus in light of the coronavirus pandemic and instead of closing, they utilised their resources to help the local community. When Founder, CEO, MBE Fiona Hamilton-Fairley and her youngest son Tristan decided to use their facilities for good, by cooking and delivering vast quantities of hot meals to The Acton Care Home and Sycamore Lodge, five days a week.
Fiona Hamilton-Fairley says, “The Acton Care Home is not very well served with shops and supermarkets nearby, so we were concerned for the 40 members of staff working at Acton Care Home. My son, Tristan and I knew that we wanted to help and had the capabilities to do so. Thanks to having fresh fruit and vegetables donated to The Kids’ Cookery School, we were able to create around 40 meals a day at no additional cost to the charity. We simply used the ingredients we would use if the school were open and the children cooking with us everyday. ”
The John Lyon’s Charity has a large endowment and the income from this enables the charity to support organisations across the nine boroughs of North and West London. Each year, the charity grants between 10 and 12 million pounds and so far has distributed £130 million to a range of services for young people, including The Kids Cookery School.
Hamilton-Fairley goes on to say that “Without the continued support and funding from John Lyon’s Charity, we would be unable to support others like we are doing now. It has been incredibly rewarding to be able to provide key workers with healthy fresh hot meals, five days a week. What’s more, we have received wonderful and appreciative feedback from the Care Homes staff and team we deliver to, including a hand-made thank you card”.
John Lyon’s Charity wants to reassure its groups that it will do all it can to survive a post Covid-19 world and is trying to work flexibly with the organisations it already supports as they face the challenges created by the pandemic. ‘From the very beginning, we put an email out to contact all of our grantees to say we’re here for you, we’ll help and we will see you through this.’
However, as Dr Guyton emphasises, it is not just their existing grantees which they are working with: ‘Our call to action is that we are open for business as usual. Although some funders have closed for new applications because they are trying to do so much work around COVID-19, we have not. We are offering emergency support but we are also open for business as usual with our grants rounds still ongoing.
To learn more about the emergency funding opportunity and to find out more about their work www.jlc.london.
By Ellen Jones
