Joy is one of BDCA’s strategic priorities since our community asked us to help them re-discover joy after the hardships of Covid-19 and the Cost-of-Living Crisis. Over the Christmas period, our staff and volunteers delivered opportunities for joy through a variety of events to hundreds of local residents! Beat the January blues by re-living the joy through the summary below:

Our Over 65s members celebrated International Volunteers Day, a Christmas Party, Festive Breakfast, a Christmas Lunch at Brewers Fayre and a Turkey & Tinsel weekend away. A huge thank you to East End Community Foundation for the lovely tote bags of chocolate tub and gift vouchers and to Barry’s Pie & Mash for providing free pie and mash to our members!

We hosted a Family Hub Christmas party attended by 67 residents with cake decorating workshop by Haliberry and a diverse feast ranging from takeaway pizza to Persian stew! Dancing to Wham was a must with our fundraiser Paris even joining in for a boogie! Big thanks to EECF for providing Christmas packs for families

Our Children’s Christmas party had 60 local primary school aged children enjoy Christmas crafts and games alongside a DJ led disco with bubbles and a snow machine. They even got a visit from Santa!

Our Toy Appeal gave out toys to 200 local children! A huge thank you to everyone who donated to our Toy Appeal alongside ELBA, Cadent and Barclays – East Ham.

ExCeL London provided a five-star Christmas Lunch experience to 30 Foodbank guests and volunteers and donated an amazing £5,000 to our Community Support project.

Our Debt Advice Centre gave out 20 Christmas hampers to our guests in need.

We held a Staff Christmas Jumper Day Competition!

And finally, we had a double party with our Annual End of Year Celebration of our staff and volunteers along with our Chair of Trustee’s 60th milestone birthday!