Reverend Rachel

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hello, my name is Reverend Rachel and I'm the vicar here at St Oswald's Church and obviously look after the church hall as well.

How long have you been here?

So just over a year.

So, you know, I know lots of people here will be on Universal Credit and other benefits and so it's hard to make ends meet.

So I'll go into some houses here and that will be my encounter.

Just surviving.

Just surviving.

Making ends meet, but not.

My role is to care for people, but also to offer hope.

And part of what we're doing here at the Food Hub is to offer hope.

So the way we do that, the practical way we do that, is to give people food with very low, you know, minimum cost to them, but also to... We really feel it's important for people to be able to come in, be seen, you know, be celebrated as who they are as human beings, whoever they are and whatever state they come into,

So that's a real important value for us here in Coney Hill at St Oswald's.

This is a bit of a lifeline for somebody like Rose.

So she can come here, she can get a bag of groceries, which won't last her through the week, but will last for her for a few days.

So it does take some of that pressure off.

And also it's an opportunity for Rose to kind of sit down with people and to start offloading.

And part of that is really important for us as human beings to be able to offload that stuff verbally.