PARTICIPANTS on our Premier League Kicks Targeted programme have been busy completing a social action to prepare and distribute emergency care packs.
Working in partnership with Middlesbrough Council’s Recovery Solutions Team these packs will be distributed to young people in the town who may find themselves between homes or places of safety, or who have been abruptly evicted from supported accommodation with nowhere immediate to turn to and a lack of essentials to hand.
Each bag consisted of the following contents – toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, shower gel, shampoo, cereal, instant meal, snacks, hygiene wipes, a small blanket and perhaps crucially a card with the following crisis numbers:
- CAMHS Crisis – 08000 516171
- Emergency Duty Team – 01642 524552
- Samaritans – 116 123
- ChildLine – 0800 1111
- My Sisters Place (Domestic Abuse & Refuge) – 01642 241864
- ARCH (Sexual Violence) – 01642 822331
- White Feather Project (Food Parcels) – 07552 830185
- Kooth (Mental Health & Wellbeing Support) – www.kooth.com/
- Integrated Support Solutions (Housing, Substance & Domestic Abuse) – 01642 726800
Over the past week 3 young people on Kicks Targeted have busied themselves with sorting through donations and items bought from a local supermarket and then packing the items into 25 individual drawstring bags. The completed emergency care packs were then donated to the Recovery Solutions Team for immediate use within the local community.
Keith Robson, PL Kicks Targeted Coordinator said:
“Having recently discovered the acute local need for emergency care packs from partners at the Recovery Solutions Team we immediately knew that this would be a really valuable social action to undertake.
“We hope that these packs will help young people in challenging circumstances to maintain some dignity and perhaps offer a little bit of hope in a real time of crisis. It was particularly heartening to see the empathy that our participants felt for those less fortunate than themselves and that what they were doing was a wholly worthwhile social action to complete.
Gillian Connor from the Integrated Recovery Solutions team at Middlesbrough Council added: “We would just like to say a huge thanks to everyone who has been a part of creating these emergency bags for the young people we work with.
“These bags will be a lifeline for our young people in the Middlesbrough area who find themselves in difficult situations or are made homeless and have nothing as a means for survival. The packs are brilliant, they have all the essential and practical items needed which will see them through a difficult few days and have some lovely nurturing items which will comfort them in their hour of need.”