Our Lady of Lourdes Church coffee mornings provide £1,000 boost to Hungerford CHAIN Handybus appeal
COFFEE mornings at a Hungerford church have raised £1,000 towards a new CHAIN Handybus.
Every first Saturday of the month, a warm and welcoming coffee morning is held in the hall of Our Lady of Lourdes RC Church.
Parishioner Caroline Ness said: “We’ve been welcoming all in our community for just over 10 years now.”
On Saturday, October 5, CHAIN chairman Keith Knight and Handybus service organiser Ted Angell, accepted a cheque for £1000 collected from the donations for coffee and cake given at the monthly events over the past year.
Bernadette Westlake, who runs the coffee mornings with Nicola Leadbitter, presented the cheque.
Ms Leadbitter explained how the coffee mornings began just after the beautifully light and welcoming new church was opened in April 2014.
Ms Ness added: “Our Lady of Lourdes had been blessed with such kindness, support and encouragement from our local church communities, not to mention a temporary home with the URC (United Reformed Church) during the building phase, that we had wished to say a huge thank you to everyone and show them what we had built.
“The first coffee morning was one of our ways of saying that thank you and it very soon became a permanent fixture.
“It was never the intention to raise funds, but to simply offer a friendly place for our community to meet.”
Nevertheless, she added, “we have always felt overwhelmed by the generosity of those that come here.
“In the early days we used the donations to pay off the debt on the build but since that was completed we have felt that we would like to repay the debt to our friends and local community for their unending support.
“With that in mind, donations have been made to The Rainbow Rooms at the hospice, West Berks Food Bank, BOB Air Ambulance, and Macmillan Cancer to name a few.
Mr Knight explained that CHAIN hopes to take delivery of the new minibus in the spring of 2025 and they continue to fundraise to achieve this.
