Spin It For Summer

Spin It For Summer

Summer Fundraising Campaign

9th - 30th June and 20th July-11th August

With (hopefully) warmer weather arriving over the next few weeks, our attention is automatically drawn to the Summer. If you are a child or young person, this also means the joy of 6 weeks of school holidays!

Unfortunately, as we all know, life can be unpredictable. An unexpected bill appears, jobs are lost, benefits are late, or rents or mortgage rates go up. Sometimes, life can feel like the spin of a wheel, where having something to eat is determined by whether you have enough money in your pocket that day.  It is so easy for life to get us in a spin, when a curve ball is thrown our way. Summer holidays are particularly difficult for families with school age children, when breakfast clubs and school lunches aren’t available, and they need additional support from our Crisis Food Service to help to stretch their resources.

According to the Scottish Government Child Poverty Map, in 2024 within the Stirling Council area, the average child poverty rate was 20.4%. However, there are areas within Stirling city centre where this figure rose to a level of nearly 48%. Areas within Raploch (41%) and Plean (39%), have children living in poverty at double the average rate for the local authority area overall.

That is why this year, our Summer fundraising campaign looks slightly different than normal, so we can support as many children and young people as we can. We are asking for your help at 2 different times, for 2 different reasons, to provide as much help as we can.

Spin It For Summer Holidays

9th - 30th June

On our wheel, you’ll see that there are 6 different items that we would especially like to be donated, in order to boost our food supplies before the school Summer holidays. We will be promoting the different items on the wheel during this period on social media, as well as highlighting where people who need food support can go to get a referral. There are a number of items for snacks, and we will be providing additional breakfast cereal and milk over the holidays, to give the children the best start to the day.

Tesco Food Donation Drive - 25th and 26th June

Tesco Superstore in Wallace Street, Stirling are again kindly hosting a Food Donation Drive for us. This will be the main fundraising event for food donations over the 3 week fundraising campaign. If you would like to come along and donate, or volunteer to help, we would be delighted to see you. Even if you can only spare an hour of your time, this would make a real difference. Please contact us if this is something that you would like to help with.

Spin It For Schooltime

20th July - 7th August

This is a great time for us to help our children and young people get ready for the new school term, to give them the best possible start to the school year. This time, the 6 items that will be on our wheel will be useful for snacks and lunch boxes, helping parents at what can be a costly time when they are having to buy new school uniforms, shoes and bags. We’ll be publicising the items required for this part of the Summer campaign in July.

How a financial donation can help

All of the items on the wheels can all be stored without refrigeration. But we would really appreciate any financial support that would help towards providing fresh milk, cheese, fruit and sandwich fillings, which we cannot accept at our donation stations. We currently spend around £4,500 each month to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables which we have to fundraise for, so financial donations of any size would help us to provide more fresh food options over the Summer.

We have made the decision not to actively appeal for school bags and contents this year, although we will distribute them if they are donated. Instead, we really want to concentrate on donating food through our Crisis Food Service over the Summer months. Throughout the campaign we will be encouraging people to support us even when the sun is out, in order to try and increase the number of food donations that we receive. We would welcome any canned or dried food donations at the moment, not just the 6 items on the wheel.

We want to share this information with as many people as we can, so please send the QR code below to anyone that you think would like to know more about our Summer fundraising campaign. Scanning the code will take them straight to our website. Alternatively, please direct them to this webpage if they would like to know more, or make a donation.

Look out for our hashtags on social media for the Summer campaign - #SummerSpin #localsupportinglocal #foodbanks

Have a lovely Summer!

If you're unsure about how much to donate, here's a list of common items and services we need to fund. Select what you'd like to contribute.