As some of you may already know, we have a scheme called Making Memories, where we aim to provide service users with tickets to shows and events or vouchers for a meal out. Every family deserves to celebrate birthdays and achievements, or simply treat their children to something a bit special every now and then.
Please donate vouchers for activities if you can or donate using link
https://cafdonate.cafonline.org/10578#/DonationDetails
Once again, thank you for all your support.
This weekend, we gathered round the TV and watched Ali Mardell, aka Emma Brooker from Coronation Street, on Celebrity Catchphrase on ITV. Ali has been a supporter of Emmeline’s Pantry and even helped out last Christmas with our ambassador, Dolly-Rose Campbell.
Ali was wonderful, and raised a tremendous £3,300 for Emmeline’s Pantry and gave us some much appreciated publicity at the same time. We are so grateful that she chose to represent us, congratulations Ali!
Along with the warm weather came our busiest period so far. Our volunteers continued to work hard to keep up with growing demand for the service, as well as starting to plan for our Christmas appeal (it’s never too early!). We added some new volunteers to the team, including our first male volunteer, Paddy.
Although we are still predominantly a women only service, we identified a need for the service for a small number of single fathers. For this reason we have introduced a mixed gender day, once a week. Single fathers can now be referred to us for food and toiletries.
In July, one of our supporters who works for the Body Shop, came in during service and offered a well deserved pamper session to clients, who could relax with a facial and hand massage after doing their shopping. What a wonderful way to treat our ladies who often put the needs of their families before their own.
July also saw our Dance Yourself Dizzy event, where volunteers an supporters danced to raise funds totalling £1,500. Everyone had fun and raised an incredible amount of money along the way. The money will go a long way towards supporting our women and preparing for what we expect to be our busiest Christmas so far.
April was a busy month for Emmeline’s. After much planning and searching, we finally got the keys to our new premises. We have been running our service from a damp basement which was no longer fit for purpose. Our new building in Chorlton will allow us to expand our services, increase referral numbers to meet growing demand and provide a warm, welcoming environment for the women who visit us.
Once we had the keys, we set to work transforming the building into our new home. With separate rooms for food and clothing, women can now browse at their leisure after waiting in our new seating area for a volunteer to become available. DFS kindly donated a brand new leather corner sofa, so now our clients can sit comfortably and chat, sharing experiences and supporting each other.
We are fortunate enough to have some wonderful volunteers who gave up their time to work exceptionally hard on the new building, painting, decorating and sprucing up the garden play area.
We have lots of plans for new building, so watch this space!
Here at Emmeline’s we are gearing up for our next big collection and this time it’s Easter eggs! This year we will be collecting all kinds of eggs, dairy free, vegetarian and simply chocolate!
We would also like to start collecting bunnies, rattles and baby bibs for the little ones who are too small for chocolate.
To drop them off or find out where to send them, please head to our facebook page @EmmelinesPantry to get in touch.
Coming up before Easter on Saturday 23rd March the Deutsch Centre Manchester are hosting a German book swap where all donations will go to Emmeline’s Pantry.
The event will be held at the Methodist Church Cafe on Oldham Street, Manchester, M1 1JQ see here for map location.
If you have any German books you don’t read anymore, or you’re looking to expand your collection, learn a new language or try some new books come down to have a look and have a chat.
They will also be collecting any German books you or your family might have grown out of as a German speaking family and there are always people looking for new books.
It will open for drop off at 12noon and the book swap will start from 4pm – 6.30pm.
For more info check out the event on Eventbrite
We can’t believe it’s already March and almost that time of year again!! But first, tomorrow is International Women’s Day, a global day first set up in 1911 to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women – while also marking a call to action for accelerating gender balance.
This year’s #Balanceforbetter campaign is striving for a gender balanced world as well as celebrating our achievements.
Here at Emmeline’s we couldn’t reach the number of ladies who access our service, or do we do without the support and constant help from so many amazing ladies across Manchester, the UK and even abroad!
Unfortunately 80% of our service users have come to us from gender based violence, trafficking and modern day slavery. There is still a way to go, but working together this is something we can achieve #Balanceforbetter. To donate this Friday 8th March head to our BT donation page you can follow the link or search us mydonate.bt.com/emmelinespantry. Help us make a change for our service users. 
It is not even the end of January 2019 and we have already been so lucky to receive so may fantastic donations from great places all across Manchester.
The Manchester Bee company’s collection throughout December raised a whopping £250 with the sale of their pin ba
dges and Christmas cards. What a great start to 2019. Head
to their website for more info: https://www.manbeeco.co.uk/
A wonderful donation from Lady Pedal Manchester who completed a cycle ride from Alexandra Park to our food bank. These wonderful ladies collected an incredible selection of cleaning stuffs and and cupboard items for us.
Stay tuned for their next exciting fundraising plans for International Women’s Day…Head over to their Facebook @Lady Pedal Manchester for more information on their upcoming events. You can also find them on Instagram @ladypedal
On Thursday 31st January Girl Gang Manchester are hosting a pub quiz: Trivial Women at the Koffee Pot to raise donations for Emmeline’s, by collecting donations from all team members rather then money. These donations can be anything from toiletries, household cleaning products, new underwear to any in date unwanted Christmas treats.
It looks like it’s going to be a great night for everyone, to find out more have a look at their Facebook event page (click here) Please come along, invite your friends and start working on your team names! Doors open at 6pm and the quiz will start at 7pm!
In other news, the wonderful Gift of Wash Kit based in Gatley are collecting your leftover foreign currency to raise money. For further details head to their Facebook page to get more information on where to send your money if you are local and can drop it off with them or where to send it to directly if not. All the information can be found on their facebook page.
We have a lot of exciting new ventures coming up that we can’t tell you about just yet so stay tuned to find out what we have planned next!!
As we come into 2019 refreshed (mostly!) we have had a chance to look back on 2018 and what we achieved as a charity in helping more women then ever before.
Throughout 2018 we helped 1002 women ! 
All of that is with the help of our amazing supporters, their time, their donations, their help and their friendly faces. We have had donations and cards from schools, both local and as far away as London. Other charities, groups and companies throughout the year. July 2018 was our Summer Sleep Out with the help of the Catholic Chaplaincy! Just as important as all these wonderful groups and organisations are the individuals and families that help us every day.
On our donation day December 20th with the help of all our amazing volunteers who really spectacular- could not have done it without them. 
We gave 80 adults and 93 children food for the holidays. 93 children received gifts. We were also able to help another 50 women with food and could give out 295 more gifts for children across Manchester. What a wonderful way to end the year with all our helpers and donations so generously!
After Christmas we got the wonderful news from Manchester Bee Co that they raised an incredible £250 from their yellow bee pins and Christmas cards which was wonderful news to end the year on! To a successful and happy 2019.
Love from Emmeline’s
It’s been a busy busy month our Christmas appeal is still going strong, the donations have been flooding in. We have updated our Amazon Wish List (click here) with all the gift sets and present ideas if you need any suggestions please have a look on there.
As part of our Christmas appeal alongside Amazon we would still really appreciate any donations you can give! This could be: chocolates, selection boxes, gift Sets, gift sets for children up to 15 or even gift vouchers.
Last weekend in other news as you will probably all have seen, our amazing ambassador Dolly-Rose Campbell was invited to turn on the Christmas Lights at a Manchester bar, New York New York and we got to go to watch her! A great way to relax and a fab opportunity to see Dolly doing more great work.
This year we are participating in the global #Giving Tuesday to encourage people to give to charities or causes that they care about. Have a click here to watch a short clip with more information on the Giving Tuesday movement.
Giving Tuesday has become a global trend now involving organisations and charities around the world! This year Emmeline’s Pantry is taking part, so please join us and our campaign.
You can do this by spreading the word to friends and family, raising awareness of our work to any businesses to help support our cause. You can click the link below to go straight to our BT donation page
Stay posted to see more from us and our campaign here and our facebook page: Emmeline’s Pantry
emmelinespantry.com 