Park fights against poverty

A business park on Teesside has launched an appeal to help poverty-stricken local families struggling to make ends meet.

Wynyard Park is calling on its tenant companies, their employees and people living in the vicinity of the 700-acre site to donate non-perishable foodstuffs which it then intends to pass on to the Trussell Trust, a charity dedicated to tackling poverty, for distribution to food banks in the area.

Donations can be dropped off at a collection point at the reception desk within Wynyard Park House.

Suitable items include UHT or powdered milk, sugar (500g), cartons of fruit juice, soup, pasta sauces, tinned sponge puddings, tinned tomatoes, cereals, rice pudding, tea bags/instant coffee, instant mashed potato, rice and pasta, tinned meat and fish, tinned vegetables, tinned fruit, jam, biscuits and snack bars.

Jennifer Boreland, Wynyard Park’s facilities co-ordinator, said: “We all know that times are hard for a lot of local families in these uncertain economic times and all it takes is redundancy or an unexpected bill when people are on low incomes to tip them over the edge.

“We want to try to make life easier for them by ensuring that they don’t have to worry about where their next meal is going to come from.

“An extra tin of soup or bag of sugar in all of our supermarket trolleys each week would make a tremendous difference to families in our region

“We are pleased to be working closely with the Trussell Trust which does a great job in supporting communities around the UK.”

The trust says that in 2011/12 food banks fed almost 129,000 people and that figure is expected to rise to over 230,000 in 2012/13.

Wynyard Park is currently home to around 65 companies which support some 2,000 jobs.