Management and tenants at The Deep Business Centre welcomed corporate contacts and all-comers to an open house organised to raise funds in support of the city’s homeless community and to kick-start a Christmas appeal.
Tenants at Centre cooked and collected food to sell at the Christmas charity event and also assembled an array of raffle and tombola prizes. The coffee morning and lunch raised around £400 in just four hours to help fund the work of Hull Homeless Outreach (HHO) in operating a soup kitchen twice a week at St Mary’s Church in Lowgate.
The event also promoted the HHO appeal for donations of food, clothing and toiletries to help homeless people.
The Business Centre management team joined forces with Jane D’Arcy, a paraplanner with Business Centre tenant LEBC Group and a volunteer with HHO, to present the festive fund-raiser.
Jane is given access to the Business Centre kitchens every week to cook for the soup kitchen and she used the same facilities to prepare a lunch of jacket potatoes with a range of fillings, all served with sweet and savoury cakes and pastries brought by other tenants and by donors who heard about the initiative through the media.
Prizes included a mini-cruise donated by P&O Ferries and a Hull Kingston Rovers team shirt presented by Hudgell Solicitors. Guests included other volunteers from HHO, staff from tenants within the Business Centre and contacts from the regional business community including the Tesco store in Hall Road, Hull, which donates food to the charity.
Jane said: “We had a fantastic response from businesses in The Deep and further afield who made donations and came along on the day to join the fun and spend some money! We raised a significant amount in a short time and we got the appeal for food, clothing and toiletries off to a good start. We are extremely grateful to everyone who helped.”
Freya Cross, Business and Corporate Manager at The Deep, said: “We have seen first-hand how much effort Jane and her colleagues from Hull Homeless Outreach put into helping homeless people and through that we have also seen how demand for their services is increasing.
“We therefore had no hesitation in selecting Hull Homeless Outreach as the charity to benefit from our Christmas fund-raising event and we are delighted that it was so well supported by our businesses here and by the wider business community.”
Anyone wishing to make donations to Hull Homeless Outreach can drop off items of food, clothing and toiletries at The Deep Business Centre during office hours until Friday 29 December. To contact The Deep Business Centre please call 01482 382000 or email business@thedeep.co.uk