CiiLOCK aims to ‘give back’ to local community
CiiLOCK aims to ‘give back’ to local community
For some time, CiiLOCK Engineering, the Stafford-based company who has its own hardware system specifically for timber bi-folds, had wanted to support a local charity in order to try and give back to the local community within Stoke-on-Trent.
The company decided on the Gingerbread Centre, a centre which takes homeless families with children.
CiiLOCK recently donated food, toiletries, cleaning products, new toys, and some arts equipment which the children can use at its Activity Club.
The Gingerbread Centre supports people by:
- Working with Social Services to try and help families avoid becoming homeless
- Offering support and temporary housing to families that are homeless. The centre has 22 self-contained flats.
- Having an internal foodbank, called “The Pantry”, so that families who arrive with nothing can pick food and toiletries from here upon their arrival.
- Offering long term support packages specific to each family’s needs.
- Teaching life skills to parents who may themselves have experienced a negative parenting experience.
- Running an Activity Club for the children at the centre so they can socialise with other children in their situation without feeling singled out.
- Arranging some Days Out for the families, Children’s Farms, Aquariums etc.
- Having a centre specifically for teenage parents to learn parenting and home making skills.
Being the only centre of its kind, they regularly get requests from social services all over the UK, with its waiting lists consistently getting longer.
To help keep providing these services, they rely on monetary and physical donations to keep it going, and this is where CiiLOCK hopes to step in.
Over the next 12 months, CiiLOCK will be making more donations like it has, while also raising some funds to support the centre and its team.
Katie Wilson, Product Marketing Specialist at CiiLOCK, said: “Personally, the work that the Gingerbread Centre is close to my heart as I brought my son up as a full time working single parent and, although I was blessed to never have experienced homelessness (it was close a couple of times), it was incredibly tough and there were times when I struggled to provide enough food for us both and afford things he needed.
“I find the work they do and the sense of normality that they want to give to the families in such tough situations is just amazing.”
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