As with many voluntary organisations, we have been holding our meetings online using Zoom. To commemorate the pleasure – or shock – of this experience, we have put together our ‘Lockdown Locks’, individual before and after photos on the day when we at last got ‘that’ cut!
At our July meeting we had our first Zoom speaker, Chloe Lee, Communities Officer at East Suffolk Council, who talked to us about Period Poverty in general and how it was affecting women and girls of low income during the COVID-19 lockdown, either because they couldn’t afford sanitary products or because there was a dearth of them in shops. The pandemic has hit people in many varied ways, which perhaps we would not have thought about.
We have continued to make syringe driver bags for Ipswich Hospital. Since lockdown began, we have taken in 100 for palliative care and end of life patients.
We have donated money to buy second-hand smart phones to help children who live in the rubbish heap shanty towns in the Philippines to continue their schooling online during lockdown. Education for them is the passport to escaping such living conditions and having a better life.
We have also been busy lobbying. We have written to our respective MPs (we cover five constituencies) asking them to support the Domestic Violence Abuse Bill currently going through the parliamentary process. We have also written to Suffolk County Council, Dr Therese Coffey MP, Tulip Siddiq, Shadow Minister for Children – Early Days and David Ellesmere, Leader of Ipswich Borough Council about the closure of Children’s Centres in Suffolk.
So it’s business more or less as usual as we work to better the lives of women and girls.