Bonny Downs Community Association is a community-led charity. Since 1998, we’ve been partnering with local residents of all ages, cultures and backgrounds to change lives and transform Newham.

We seek to make a positive and lasting impact by helping people to tackle the inequalities and injustices they face, build on their unique strengths so they can fulfil their true potential, and celebrate life together in our wonderful and diverse borough. 

Initially we were going to do a series of filmed workshops with the Westhill funding. However, with Covid and lockdown, this was no longer possible. We have decided instead to hire a local independent filmmaker to create a short video reviewing our year, illustrating how Covid affected Newham, one of the worst-hit London boroughs in terms of Covid-19 mortality rates, and how our staff, volunteers and community rose to meet the challenge and provide support and emergency relief to our neighbours in need. 

It will showcase how we began supporting whole new cohorts of the community we hadn’t worked with closely before, including people suddenly struggling without jobs and navigating the benefits system for the first time, families with no recourse to public funds, and scores of stranded international students. 

We will use the film to thank all of our volunteers, both long-standing and new ones, who delivered emergency relief packs to households across the borough and increased our foodbank provision as demand increased 15-fold and our amazing staff who underwent one of our biggest operational changes to deliver those provisions and change our activities to online services instead of face-to-face provisions. 

Once the film is ready, we hope to show the film to all of our service users, volunteers, staff, funders and partners.

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