Can you help Pembroke House help others?

Pembroke House is urgently seeking support from Pembroke Members as it expands the assistance it offers to vulnerable members of the Walworth community, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the past few weeks, Pembroke House has reoriented and expanded its local community support. It has moved a number of its activities online and set up an emergency food distribution hub that delivers food to 850 people a week. It aims to expand its operation to assist up to 1,500 people who are self-isolating or being shielded, and who don’t have family or friends to support them.

Pembroke House has recruited hundreds of volunteers to help with the packing and distribution of meals and will soon need support from more volunteers with more specific skill sets, including in logistics and IT. It also needs financial support to help address an expected shortfall of £160,000 in its funding over the next three months.

Based in the borough of Southwark, south London, Pembroke House was founded in 1885 on the initiative of Pembroke undergraduates who were dismayed at the inequality and deprivation found in inner cities. Even today, the estates immediately surrounding Pembroke House fall within the bottom 10% most deprived nationally, a third of the children in East Walworth live in poverty, and it is one of the neighbourhoods in London most at risk of social isolation among the elderly.

Today it delivers over 30 different community, well-being, arts and education projects for local residents of all ages. The closure of meeting spaces has meant that it has had to be creative in the ways it continues to offer activities which provide structure, sociability and support in so many people’s lives.

So far, it has:

• Reopened the community centre as an emergency food distribution hub and set up a local delivery network to help the vulnerable get access to food and other essential goods, such as medicine.
• Replaced the Walworth Living Room with a Virtual Living Room where its participants can continue to take part in online activities and events. An online choir, a parents, babies and toddlers music group, and dance classes for young adults with learning difficulties are already up and running with much more to come.
• Set up a new Information website that pulls together essential up-to-date information for local residents from how they can connect with local mutual aid groups and support networks, to information about local resources including supermarkets and pharmacies.

Pembroke House is currently receiving 2.5 tonnes of food each week from Fareshare, which redistributes surplus food to charities. The Lower Hall of Pembroke House has been filled with fridges, while the bookshelves are used to store fruit and vegetables. The food is packed by volunteers in the Hall and delivered to people’s doorsteps by a team of 45 volunteer riders on bikes.

This rapid response is making a big difference in Walworth, and Pembroke House is working with Southwark Borough Council on a network of similar hubs across the borough. Additionally, the Government is now using Pembroke House’s second site, the Walworth Living Room, as a base for their operations to deliver supplies to clinically vulnerable people.

However, Pembroke House is doing this in the face of significant financial pressure. Some of the funders have adjusted how Pembroke House can use their grants, but from the loss of income from renting out meeting rooms and property and the need to scale up the services it provides, the charity estimates that it will face a £160,000 shortfall in its income over the next three months.

How can Pembroke Members help?

By making a gift in support of the Pembroke House COVID-19 appeal: http://cutt.ly/pembrokehouse

Any donations of whatever size will be gratefully received. Pembroke House is a registered charity (Pembroke College Settlement, no. 1177866 – formerly known as the Pembroke College Mission, no. 211025) and UK taxpayers can Gift Aid their donation to increase its value by 25%.

By volunteering: While Pembroke House has had a fantastic response to its call for volunteer packers and deliverers, it will soon have some specific volunteering roles that could potentially be done remotely. If you would be interested in hearing more about these opportunities please sign up to Pembroke House’s mailing list to receive updates: https://cutt.ly/ph-mailing-list

If you want to get in touch with Pembroke house please contact James Jenkins at james.jenkins@pembrokehouse.org.uk.

Follow Pembroke House on Twitter (@Pembroke1885) and Facebook.