On Friday the 16th of December, the time came for our Annual Christmas Charity morning. This year, we visited our very good friends at Bloom Cafe & Hope Centre, where we packed festive bags for vulnerable women in Brighton. Bloom is located on London Road, and while they sell delicious coffee and cake, their Hope Centre is an incredible space supporting women in need.
The centre is located within the cafe and supports women who have come from vulnerable and/or dangerous situations. They provide workshops focusing on creativity, well-being, and learning fun, new skills. The Hope Centre also has amazing partnerships with incredible services from across the homeless sector as well as other local specialist charities. They exist to bridge the gap between support services and women needing support by building a community where people can come together.
Seed’s Mission: Supporting Our local Community
If you read last year’s charity morning round-up, you’d know that as an agency, our mission is to support and give back to our local community, and we have three main areas we focus on. Number one is the environment, and we successfully arranged a beach clean back in 2021 and planted trees at the beginning of this year to support this cause.
Number two is homelessness in Brighton, where we packaged festive hampers at our local foodbank last Christmas and formed a strong partnership with our friends at Off The Fence.
Thirdly – we aim to support women in Brighton. Find out more about our morning at Bloom Cafe and Hope Centre below.
Our Morning at Bloom Cafe & Hope Centre
In the lead-up to this event, we arranged with Emma (Bloom Cafe Manager) and Jen (Safehaven Outreach Lead) to see if they could give our team a little background on what the cafe does and who we were going to be supporting on the day. However, they had other great ideas to create a festive quiz where the team also learned facts about the cafe and the people it helps – this also went down well with our highly competitive team..!
The second part of the morning consisted of designing Christmas cards and bags, organising the gifts, and listening to festive tunes! These packages were made for a women’s refuge centre which Bloom has a partnership to brighten the Christmases of women and children, plus the key workers that help support them.
Follow Bloom Cafe and Hope Centre on Instagram here.
What Did We Achieve?
In total, the team packed roughly 53 packages. This consisted of 17 festive bags for the refuge women, eight for the children and babies, and eight for the key workers looking after them. Additionally, we packed up 20 bags for women who join the refuge next year, along with three big bags of donated baby clothes from one of our Seedlings!
We would like to thank Emma and Jen from Bloom for teaming up with us this year; it was great for the team to learn what amazing things the cafe and hope centre do! We’re looking forward to continuing our partnership for years to come.
As the year comes to an end, our charity team is in full planning mode for more team events for us to tackle next year. If you’d like to partner with us in 2023, we’d love to hear from you!
