5 years.
1825 days since the world, my world, your world probably too, changed forever.
People talk about the times “before COVID” and now its been so long, its hard to remember, it feels like before COVID was so long ago everything was black and white.
I think all of us were so used to just getting on with everyday life, doing the same thing everyday and just surviving, that when covid hit and lockdown happened, it was like reality literally shattered around us and a new reality slowly unpacked itself.
For me, it was like everything suddenly sped up – from the moment I watched Boris on the telly telling us to stay home and not go out , and the fact that pregnant women were the most vulnerable, I just felt I had to do something. It was like an uncontrollable urge to run straight into the danger zone, into the fire. I suppose it was partly my journalist instinct – even when covering stories like the 2010 student protests (that I was unwittingly part of) I had stayed in at the heart of the story so I could get the best pictures.
There was no way I was staying at home and hiding, when I was a fit 28 year old with no health issues, living with my fiancé who was also fit and healthy. My fiancé (now my amazing husband) was working in insurance and so was deemed a key worker; which meant between March and May 2020 he was actually still in the office and going to work each day, and so I felt I really needed to as well, to do my part.
But this was also different. I had been running VFTS for 6 years and for the first time since arriving in Salford in 2013 as a fresh graduate, I saw the “need” that everyone kept talking about. I saw the panic in the parents eyes in the queue in Tesco. I saw the frantic posts about furlough and schools being off and having to isolate because of pregnancy.
I saw that all around us, support systems were collapsing. Those structural organisations that were meant to support parents like social services, midwives, health visitors, children centres, GP surgeries, they were all in their own state of panic; everyone forced to work from home, close their buildings, shut off from the world. Of course I know now that NHS staff were redeployed and there was a whole other world I didn’t know anything about happening in healthcare. But what I saw was mums and dads not getting the vital support they needed, at the time they needed it. And I felt it in my heart and bones that it was finally time for me to step up.
I spoke to Rachel – at the time my one and only employee and fellow director of the business, and soon discovered that she felt the same. And then I rang Salford CVS, our voluntary sector infrastructure organisation and found out that instead of collapsing and going home, they too had sprung into action.
I have since learned that Salford CVS has its own emergency action plans and is heavily involved in being part of Salford City Council’s emergency response (such as what to do when there is a flooding, earthquake etc) and whilst a pandemic hadn’t necessarily been on the top of the list, they had been prepping for something like lockdown to happen for a few weeks before it was even announced. So when I rang Jeremy and explained my idea – that i was going to get nappies to parents who needed them – he fully accepted the idea with no questions asked and instead asked what i needed to make it happen. I said I needed money and some items in bulk and then some volunteers who would be able to deliver items to peoples houses.
Less than a week later, I had CVS staff turn up at my door with a van full of baby essentials from Costco, i had £500 from the “crisis fund” and I had nearly 30 volunteers ready to go. Those volunteers would go on to be the heartbeat of the service we created; and I found that they were all motivated by the same intrinsic urge as me, the desire to help, to not sit around and wait for it all to be over. Many of them were in white collar, professional jobs where their office had closed and it was either home working or on furlough. Some had been laid off altogether and were volunteering just to get out of the house. Some were local councillors or also volunteering for the Spirit of Salford helpline and so knew what people were asking for and why. I could not have done without them that summer; they helped create the service that is now my charity’s core charitable activity. Three of them are unbelievably still volunteering for us, one is even our Chair of Trustees!
Little did I know what would happen next; I decided to put my phone number on Twitter and ask for CVS to retweet the fact that we could take referrals. From the end of March 2020, my phone didn’t stop ringing for the first 3 months of lockdown. The volunteers were astoundingly delivering around 100 parcels a week in April and May 2020. I was queueing up in Tesco everyday of the week to buy £100-200 worth of nappies and take them all home so I could pack them.
The reason we were able to expand so quickly was because after that infamous tweet, Manchester City council had got wind of my phone number and rang me to ask if we could deliver to Manchester clients as well. I said yes but that it would cost money, so they said I should apply to the We Love MCR fund – and this again was granted less than a week later. But in return, every time a family phoned the MCC emergency food helpline, they would get given my number to ask for nappies and baby milk. This meant I was often speaking to – and listening to the stories of – more than 30 families a day 😳 who were struggling across Salford and Manchester.
I had no idea what I was getting into. But those stories, those clients talking to me down the end of the phone kept me going, they were my why.
My reality was nothing compared to some of the horrific things people in Greater Manchester were experiencing.
It was all quite surreal really; the need didn’t stop coming, but neither did the money or the help. We kept communicating about what we were doing and in between the phone calls asking for help were the ones offering us money or volunteers or donations of stuff. A dad turned up at my door with a pile of nappies so big I couldn’t see over it. A cheque for £500 just arrived in the post. Funders previously funding only project costs gave us money within a week with the freedom to spend it on whatever we wanted.
And for the first time ever, we had enough funding to be able to pay staff costs, so I could do what I was doing, what I needed to do without worrying how my own bills were going to be paid. I had a glimpse of what it was like to actually run an efficient, well-oiled service that was quickly gaining a reputation as a vital part of the community and I wanted more of it. This is what my heart had always wanted to do when I first created VFTS, I wanted us to be a safe space that any parent could turn to, no matter their situation.
I could go on and write so much more, but some of the rest as they say is history that many of you already know. Our work for those nearly 12 months of lockdown led us somehow to this day, 5 years later. We now have not just one but six services, 6 members of staff and Stork Support is still serving the need that was already there but was just uncovered by COVID and the reality that was 2020 and 2021. My heart is still heavy with the weight of the stories I heard during that time, but also so much lighter knowing that we did everything we could at the time, and we continue to make a difference everyday.
But it wasn’t just us that stepped up in that time; I found that we were a small cog in a huge wheel of grassroots organisations across Salford and Manchester that came out of the woodwork in lockdown. I’m part of a mutual aid group with 20+ members who all helped each other with resources and volunteers and connections. Other, small orgs or even individuals came together to create charities that are now an everyday part of the landscape. Community groups previously doing completely different work started doing food support and are still doing it now. And we all believed strongly in each others mission – to help our communities in a time of crisis and to continue being part of that change.
I think one thing that all connects the orgs that were able to step up the most is that we were tiny but that meant only one or two decision makers, not a whole team or board of people with differing opinions. We were able to weigh up the risks of doing what we needed to do with fresh eyes compared to those who were already used to bureaucracy and proformas and red tape.
As I write this 5 years on, with a growing team around me and a huge responsibility to keep what is now a medium sized charity(!!) running, we have started to change some of our ways of working that now I know were influenced by COVID and just the urge to do what we had to do, no matter what it takes.
Whilst I have mixed feelings on this, I know that no matter what happens in the next 5 years, we will always be prepared to do what we have to do, to fight for what we believe in and to advocate for our most vulnerable clients who dont have a voice. They are and always will be our community and that is what is most important ❤️
