You can catch up on his first and second diaries here.
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Hello everyone.
I’m here to bring you my third instalment of my Foundation diaries.
It has been a busy time for me since the last diary entry. We’ve had two very busy half term breaks as well as continuing our foodbank support and fan park activities.
We have continued to make a difference to the lives of young people in Wolverhampton through our holiday activity camps. Since the last diary entry our team have delivered 88 hours of activity camp sessions to over 100 participants.
We have continued to work very closely with local primary schools as well as providing central activities at The Way Youth Zone to ensure as many young people as possible in the city have access to our sessions. Typically, the participants will take part in physical activities such as sports and team games, as well as some fun arts and crafts. They’ll also have some educational workshops around health and nutrition and how Feed Our Pack is making a difference in the community.
One group in particular had a very special surprise during one of our Easter activity sessions, when Raul Jimenez and Conor Coady dropped by to say hello and take part in some cooking activities!
With help from Molineux head chef Luke Hitchins, the participants were able to cook with their favourite players and learn about what the players eat and the benefits of certain ingredients to their health. Healthy eating and teaching the children how to cook is a very important part of our sessions and it was fantastic to see how engaged the children were especially with the support of their heroes!
👨🍳 Chef Coady 🆚 Chef Jimenez 👨🍳
— Wolves Foundation (@wwfcfoundation) May 19, 2022
The @Wolves players visited #FeedOurPack activity camps at @TheWayYouthZone, and joined the children for a cooking challenge! 🍽️@PLCommunities 🎥 pic.twitter.com/2hmuguxsAP
We’ve also continued to deliver food support to local primary schools to feed families during half term. Since the end of March we have supplied enough food to feed 450 families.
Our partnership with food re-distribution charity HISFOOD has also meant that we’ve been able to distribute 16 pallets full of food to local organisations this year to assist them with their ever-increasing demand. This means that this year, over 25,000 meals have been provided through Feed Our Pack.
The imagination and support of the city of Wolverhampton has been a huge part of Feed Our Pack’s success too. Just over the last few months we’ve had George and Charlie, two local nine-year-olds, who completed a 5km ‘dribblathon’ and raised £900. Another shout out goes to young Noah Beach, a regular at the fan park container on match days, who has raised over £500 raffling off items. It’s great to have fans so actively involved in helping their community.
The end of the season has meant an end to this season’s food collections through our donation point in the fan zone. Having a presence on match day has really been an amazing opportunity to promote Feed Our Pack, meet and talk to fans and talk about the impact of the project.
Since we started collecting donations back in November, we have received 115 baskets of food all donated by fans. All the food donated has been distributed to foodbanks across Wolverhampton and has been very well received.
One of these was the Secret Angels foodbank in New Park Village – thanks to them for the pic of me dropping off the goods!
While the match day donation point may be closed for now, we’re still always happy to take food donations as we continue to distribute to those in need. If anyone has donations for Feed Our Pack, drop me an email to ollielocker@wolves.co.uk and we can arrange the best way for you to pass these on.
For now my focus is planning for the summer holidays. This will include six weeks of activity camp sessions which will definitely be keeping me busy!
Until next time
Ollie
