Staying at home during the lockdown

What’s it like to be too afraid to go outside and the children need fed and entertained?

This is the situation for many families during the lockdown. Families with young children are impacted by the fear of venturing outside but fear the return to a life of isolation. The achievement of leaving the experience of isolation behind and finding their confidence and a sense of belonging to their community feels like a time remembered but was it real. Lockdown is a new reality – a disconnect from the community and a return to a state of being and feeling alone. 

Our telephone/text contact with every family engaged in our family support and wellbeing projects whether through our community activity, nursery wellbeing or primary school family support ensures families that they are not alone. Here at Stepping Stones for Families we are continuing to provide support/advice and hopefully lots and lots of fun and laughter for the families we engage with throughout the year. 

During the lockdown we have been very busy responding to the needs and demands of the families, partners and local authority.

Our 2 childcare nurseries in Glasgow closed in line with Government advice on school and nursery closures. We had no demand for places for children of key workers. However, we are working as part of the leadership team at Keppoch Campus in Possilpark where the 2 primary schools, nursery and our Out of School Care have joined up to provide a holistic service for key workers and children who require individual support during the Easter holidays.

Our commitment to ensuring families with young children have access to healthy and nutritious food sees our small community based team providing weekly food bags and essential household items to over 200 families with over 240 childrren. The food is sourced and delivered to a central venue where the bag packing takes place. Thanks to Barnhill Farm for delivering their supplies in individual packs for the families, this saves so much time. The bags are then delivered to families across north west and north east Glasgow and to rural communities throughout Carrick South Ayrshire.

More and more families are being referred to us for help. We have now opened up a register for new families who haven’t previously engaged with our services but we can’t leave any family with a young child lacking food and basic essentials. 

To cope with the growing demand and to save the suspension on our workers’ cars we have managed to recruit a volunteer driver with a van to help with the deliveries. We are grateful to #Find Volunteers at Volunteer Glasgow for putting us in touch with a local contact who we hope will be joining the team next week. 

We are also grateful to STV Children’s Appeal for the award of £2k to support our food programme. As this is not just for Easter holidays we will need to source additional funding to sustain this throughout the lockdown.

Donations to support our work can be made on our Just Giving page.

We hope that our continued involvement with the families and the provision of good food and interesting ingredients makes life under lockdown a better reality.