52 Lives

#285 Homeless children

Request: Clothes / Donations / Messages

This week, we’d like to help some mums and children living in extreme poverty in East London.

Our friends at The Magpie Project charity provide practical and emotional support for mums and children under five living in temporary accommodation in Newham (in this area alone there are 2000 homeless children under 5). Most of the families are living in one room in shared houses or hostels. The Magpies are doing what they can to try to make sure the children’s long-term well-being is not affected by this period of homelessness.

The families they help are in crisis. Many have no access to public funds, which means they rely on charities for food and clothing.

We heard that the Magpies are running low on supplies. They have been putting together clothing bundles for the families they help, but are short of good quality children’s clothes.

We’d like to provide it for them. 

What We Need

1. New clothes from a wishlist: We've set up an Amazon wishlist filled with some new clothes for the children. It is so rare that they ever receive anything new, so we'd like to try to do this for them if we can.  To buy something from our wishlist, please click the link below. It will be sent directly to the Magpies to give to the children.

2. High quality second hand clothing: The Magpies also accept very good quality second hand clothing - they only need clothes for children aged 1-6 at the moment and please only select the best few items from what you're willing to donate, so we don't bombard them with bags of second hand clothes!
Small parcels can be posted to:
The Magpie Project
The Lodge, Forest Lane Park
Magpie Close, Forest Lane, 
London, E7 9DF

3. Donations: We'll use your donations to buy clothing and other things the families need. To make a donation online, please click the link below. To donate by text, please use the details in the box below. 

4. Kind messages: We'd love to provide kind messages to go with the clothing bundles. To send a kind message to a mum going through a tough time, you can email it by writing your message inthe form below (your contact details will not be shared), or you can post it to: 52 Lives (Magpies), PO Box 3154, Reading, RG1 9AT. 

BUY A GIFT

 DONATE ONLINE

What We Did

Every item was bought from the wishlist, providing clothes for dozens of children living in extreme poverty. We also raised almost £2000, which will be used to have many of the children properly fitted for shoes. The Magpie Project asked us to pass a thank you message along to you all...

"Jaime, We are utterly overwhelmed with the response from all the wonderful people at 52 Lives. It is easy for our mums and minis to feel embattled, like nobody cares about their plight, like they have to fight, struggle, and work to get things that other just take for granted. So this means everything.

It was literally 12 hours after you put out your call for help when the parcels started arriving. First 3 then 10, then 72 parcels in one go! I had some explaining to do to the delivery man, but he was happy because it meant he got to do a shorter route with fewer stops that day!

Most parcels had messages of love and support. I sat in tears reading them, and we passed them on to the mums too.

We have distributed clothes to at least 50 of our families this week and we have more to give out - hopefully after April 12th we will set up a sort of outdoor stall and mums and minis will have the choice again.

Little 'Mini A' is a really gorgeous girl, curious, clever and always wearing a slightly defiant and sulky face (which we love!). We have known her since the day she arrived in the world 6 weeks early and we ran around trying to get mum nappies and babygrows! This week we were over the moon to give her a brand new top and joggers. 'Unicorns please' she said. Mama J was so grateful, she said 'I can't believe it. We have only had hand-me-downs for so long...it is amazing to get to open the packaging on new clothes.'

What you have done for our families goes beyond clothing them, you have given them hope, love and the sense that someone is thinking of them."