Colleagues at our Leeds head office have been joining in with all the great work our stores are doing across the country to offer support to people in need of some help this Christmas.
They donated sleeping bags, warm clothing and hundreds of meals made by our chefs Andrew Johnston and Mark Richmond using leftover samples for volunteers from Leeds Homeless Partnership to distribute throughout the festive period.
The group serve warm meals from their kitchen in Leeds City Square on Monday evenings and also deliver food parcels to people in need across the city.
Dawn Hay – pictured at the top of the page with Andrew and Mark – formed the group with other volunteers two years ago.
She said: "We're really grateful to Asda. It makes a massive difference to us, we're absolutely overwhelmed.
"They've donated things we can give to people right now, like mince pies, cakes and sweets, and we've already defrosted some of the meals Mark made to go straight out.
"There were so many donations we can hardly fit it all in storage. We've got tents, sleeping bags, socks, gloves, scarves, blankets – if you're on the streets you obviously don't have a way of washing or drying anything so we need as many of these as we can get our hands on."
Find out more about Leeds Homeless Partnership's work in this video:
Dawn said: "The colleagues really understand what we're trying to do and genuinely want to help, they've supported us from when we started out two years ago.
"We started by giving out hot water, tea and soup. We saw how many people were coming up to us and knew we needed to do more, and it's evolved from there.
"We don't just support homeless people, we get young families and people in hostels coming to us who are struggling too.
"I've got a part-time job, six kids and I put as many hours into this as I can, as all our volunteers do, and Asda's help makes all our lives so much easier."
Mark said: "I've worked in Leeds all my life and you see the problem of homelessness around the city, and I think the Leeds Homeless Partnership do a wonderful job – they are unsung heroes. To them, the little help we give them is massive so we're really happy to support them."
