Waitrose Putney’s charity token vote is back, and this time two of the three causes in the boxes help families in Wandsworth.
Shoppers can grab a free green token at the till to drop in one of three boxes, under Waitrose’s Community Matters scheme. The cause with the most tokens gets £1,500, second place £1,000 and third £500. In the last round, all three causes came from Hammersmith and Fulham.
Wandsworth Foodbank is one of the local two. Three of its six welcome centres, where people collect emergency food, are in the Putney area: The Yard on the Ashburton Estate, on Wednesday mornings; Roehampton Methodist Church on Friday afternoons; and St Michael’s Church on Wimbledon Park Road, Southfields, on Monday lunchtimes. People need a referral to use it. Last year it gave out 13,054 emergency food parcels, and 63% of them went to households with children.
The other is the Eileen Lecky Fund, which gives small cash grants to children in Wandsworth, usually £100 to £300, for things their families cannot afford: school shoes, a bed, a cooker, a school trip. Parents cannot ask for themselves. A social worker, head teacher, health professional or church minister applies for the child. For now, the fund is capping grants at £200.
The fund grew out of the children’s clinic that opened on Clarendon Drive in 1931, and the clinic still carries Eileen Lecky’s name. She was its secretary for fifty years. The fund is run by volunteers, and last year it spent £5,800.
The third cause, Missing People, is a national charity, with its head office on Upper Richmond Road West in East Sheen. It runs a free, confidential helpline for anyone affected when someone goes missing.
The same £1,500 means very different things to each of them. Going by each charity’s latest accounts, a first prize would cover about three months of the Eileen Lecky Fund’s spending. It would cover about 15 hours of the foodbank’s, and about three hours of Missing People’s.
What happens after the vote is less clear. Putney.news first wrote about the vote in January, when Putney Relief Committee was one of the three, and has followed every round at the shop since. We have never found out who “won” any of them, and the results aren’t made public, as far as we can find. We’ve now asked Waitrose for all three results, and for this round’s closing date, and will add them here when they arrive.
How to take part
Vote. Pick up a free green token when you pay at Waitrose Putney, and ask if you are not offered one. Drop it in the box for the cause you want to back. You can vote every time you shop.
Get your group on the list. Waitrose says it welcomes applications from local community groups. Any Putney charity or group that wants a place in a future round can ask at Waitrose Putney.
If you need help. Wandsworth Foodbank works by referral from local agencies, or through Trussell’s free national helpline, 0808 208 2138. Social workers, teachers and health professionals can apply to the Eileen Lecky Fund at eileenleckyfund.pages.dev. Missing People’s helpline is 116 000, free, from 10am to 10pm every day.
