A village social group founded to combat loneliness in the wake of the COVID pandemic has raised £5,000 for Salisbury Trust for the Homeless.
Salisbury Trust for the Homeless (STFH) is a local charity which helps homeless people get their lives back on track.
The Chilmark Coffee Kitchen holds regular coffee mornings and lunches in the Reading Room in the south Wiltshire village to provide an opportunity for the local community to meet up and socialise.
The group was founded by Lynn Menzies after she became aware of people in the village who were lonely. The meetings are free to attend, but people can make a donation if they wish. It was decided to donate the accumulated contributions to charity, and local people realised that the one thing they had in common was a roof over their heads. So they decided to give the money to STFH, as it is a local charity for the homeless.
Gordon Pardy, Head of Fundraising for STFH, said: “We are incredibly grateful to the people of Chilmark - £5,000 is a huge amount of money for a village such as this, which only has a small population. STFH gets no funding from either central or local government, and so we are very much dependent on the generosity of the people of South Wiltshire. The Chilmark donation is a fantastic example of this."
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