Every first Saturday of the month, a warm and welcoming coffee morning is held in the hall of Our Lady of Lourdes RC Church Hungerford. We have been welcoming all in our community for just over 10 years now. This monthly ‘Coffee, Cake and Chat’ with friends new and old is very much ‘a thing’ here as Nicola Leadbitter explained this last Saturday morning 5 October when welcoming members of the local charity CHAIN. Keith Knight, chairman of CHAIN, was accompanied by Ted Angell who has organised the Handybus service for many years and Keith Mayes who has just taken over this role. They were with us to accept a cheque for £1,000 collected from the generous donations for coffee and cake given by our friends and supporters at the monthly events over the past year.
Bernadette Westlake, who runs the coffee mornings with Nicola Leadbitter, presented the cheque to a delighted Keith after Nicola explained how the coffee mornings in the church hall began just after the beautifully light and welcoming new church was opened in April 2014. 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 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. 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 West Berkshire Hospital, West Berks Food Bank, BOB Air Ambulance, and Macmillan Cancer to name a few.
It is with great pleasure that this latest donation is made to the CHAIN minibus appeal. Keith explained that CHAIN hope to take delivery of the new minibus in the spring of 2025 and they continue to fundraise to achieve this. The Handybus, as it is known, is used regularly by the community and makes a huge difference to the lives of many who cannot get out easily on their own, do not have personal transport or have physical infirmities. CHAIN relies on volunteer drivers to make their services available to our community. It is an incredibly valuable service and much appreciated by many of those who attend our coffee mornings.
Caroline Ness
Our Lady of Lourdes
Hungerford
