In Your Shoes - Genna

Monday

We start the week with our team meeting. I’m excited about this as we’ve only been in our new warehouse and office at Unit 23/25 Tom Johnston Road for a few weeks, and we’ve recently expanded our workforce too, so it’s great to get everyone together to discuss what’s coming up in the week. Today we also talked about fundraising for Christmas, and the themes this year’s Christmas card competition.

Dundee Bairns was originally established by our founder and Chair, David Dorward, in 2016 to provide free breakfasts and lunches to primary aged children during the school holidays in areas of multiple deprivation. This was an effort to help children who were in receipt of free school meals during term time, and address what was then described as “holiday hunger”. In the Summer of 2016 with the assistance of Tayside Contracts we delivered 19,000 meals, and so began our Fun and Food programme.

In 2017 a Primary School headteacher mentioned that some of his children would benefit from a hot evening meal at the end of the school day, during the autumn and winter months. Tayside Contracts again assisted Dundee Bairns with the preparation of a two-course hot evening meal for around 30 children per school, and our Tea Clubs service was born.

Every year since 2017 the Fun and Food Programme and the Tea Clubs have operated and in total we have delivered over 500,000 meals.

In 2020 through funding from the Rank Foundation I was appointed as Manager and our first full-time member of staff. The charity now has a turnover of over £500,000 per annum and employs four full-time and four part-time staff.

Later in the day I wrote some thank you letters. We are nothing without our supporters, and I love getting in touch to say thanks and explain what a difference each donation makes. Over the last eight years we have had tremendous support from a wide variety of funders, including Northwood Trust, Rank Foundation, Cash for Kids, Robertson Trust and Dundee City Council. The general public has always been extremely generous to Dundee Bairns, and in the last financial year we received over £120,000.

In the evening, we had a get together of Trustees and staff in our new office and warehouse, before holding one of our quarterly Board meetings. We now have a Board of ten Trustees, and they place a strong emphasis on the good governance of our charity.

Tuesday

Today I had a catchup with Lauren Bell, our Dundee Bairns Healthy Eating Coordinator, who joined Dundee Bairns in July 2024.  We received a three-year grant from the Whole Family Wellbeing Fund to appoint Lauren. She has been spending time out and about visiting different projects within Dundee to see how our funding for food is spent, observing how different projects use the funding, and gathering feedback.

We met to discuss the new Dundee Bairns healthy eating guidelines she is working on in conjunction with the NHS to help provide guidance to the projects who receive our funding. We are looking forward to these being rolled out over the next few months.

It was all systems go this afternoon when Dave Wimhurst, our Warehouse Manager, fulfilled an emergency Beds for Bairns request for three new beds for a family in desperate need. In March 2024 in partnership with Help for Kids we established the Bed for Bairns project to address child bed poverty in the city. In the six weeks to the 17th of May 2024, we delivered 85 beds.

Throughout the week we deal with ad-hoc or emergency requests from our referral base as we are well equipped to respond rapidly to help families and children in need. Our referrers are a critical part of our service delivery; they are all professional child and family practitioners, or community workers and they are the ones who seek our services for individual or groups of children and families.

Wednesday

This morning I met with Susan Maxwell, our Programme and Volunteer Coordinator, who has been dealing with enquiries about our upcoming Tea Club Programme.  We were successful in our application to the Whole Family Wellbeing Fund and are now able to offer fully funded hot meals to all primary schools within Dundee for any of their after-school provision.  This helps to discreetly target some of the more vulnerable members of the school community over the winter months as well as building community cohesion between families and the schools.  One of the key principles of Dundee Bairns wide variety of provision is dignity, and we like to be able to offer more than just a meal. Susan is actively engaging in discussions with local partners such as Dundee Science Centre to offer as wide a variety of activity alongside our meals as possible.

Susan also has responsibility for managing everything associated with our volunteers. We wouldn’t be able to deliver all the services we provide without the support of over 50 volunteers, including several corporate partners such as the Royal Bank of Scotland, Apex Hotel and Smith Interconnect. Susan is busy just now organising an event with the support of the Malmaison Hotel to say thank you to our volunteers.

Thursday

This morning Susan and Lauren attended the Freshers Fair at St John’s RC High School.  They played some fun games with the new cohort of first years around sugar and fat content in drinks and fast food, to try and encourage them to think more about their food choices.  This was really engaging with the pupils so hopefully we managed to plant a few seeds there.

Today was also delivery day for our Bairns at Home multibank project, which is always exciting. The lorry arrived from our partners at The Big Hoose, Fife which our warehouse staff Brian Johnstone and Declan Smith unloaded and sorted before delivering to our referrers. This is the best part of the week as you never know what you might find that could help those in need; it’s like Christmas morning!

Bairns at Home was born when we were approached by ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown in March 2023 to set up a multibank project here in Dundee, using donations from Amazon and other retailers and manufacturers. In September 2023 we launched the Bairns at Home multibank. This project has been operating for eleven months and we have distributed 109,138 items, supported children on 11,894 occasions and individual families on 6870 occasions.

This afternoon our two part-time administration staff Dee Pearce and Anne Anderson were working on the agenda and papers for our quarterly Board meeting and the financial projections.

Friday

It’s been a great morning: Lauren has been having great fun in the office making interactive and visual nutrition activities. These will be offered alongside our Tea Clubs as a fun and engaging way to teach children about the importance of having a nutritional diet.

Dave’s been busy today too, meeting with some of our referrers to understand more about how the Bairns at Home project works for them and thinking about how we can improve our service. This has generated great ideas which we will use to create even greater impact for Dundee.

The Covid lockdowns in 2020 were particularly challenging for Dundee Bairns and we delivered many more meals than we normally did. During the Covid lockdowns we also started our Cosy Bairns programme providing clothing or clothing vouchers to children in need. This afternoon I dealt with some enquiries for our Cosy Bairns project.

Well, that is it for another week and I know that we are helping so many children and families in the City have a better life is very challenging times. Our trustees and staff are committed to continuing to deliver the support Dundee Bairns provides, be it meals, clothing and footwear, beds of everyday household items.