Oasis During COVID-19
Tom has been a regular at Oasis for many years, attending daily. He has no family or other friends, and when lockdown hit he was devastated to be told to shield for 4 months.
In that time he never left his house, relying on food packs from Oasis. He said that lockdown felt worse than prison, because at least there you had people to talk to. Tom has said that Oasis was a lifeline, through the weekly food packs and regular phone calls. Friday afternoon zoom chats are the highlight of his week and he says those are the only times he laughs in the week. He works diligently through his activity packs and says that he is looking forward to bringing them to us after lockdown so we can mark all his work!
Due to the vulnerability of our clientele including underlying health conditions, poor hygiene, and a lack of COVID-19 awareness we decided to close our centre to the general public and work remotely a week before national lockdown back in March 2020. In the first 3 months of 2020 we had already had a footfall of 2,719 and since then, we have developed our COVID-19 Provision Programme supporting Oasis clients, local residents, schools, Churches, charities, hotels housing our homeless communities and care homes with 3 support programmes: 1) Emergency Food Provision, 2) Crisis Support and 3) Education and Wellbeing. All this has been managed by literally a hand full of Oasis staff.
"I’ve been on sick pay and they had got my info wrong so it stopped. I just couldn’t sort out the problem, I didn’t know how to get in touch with the right person. It was confusing me. Then Oasis gave me food and started talking to the job centre. It was a huge relief.”
A member of the Oasis Community who we have helped during the pandemic
622 Crisis issues addressed to vulnerable people
3,293 Emergency food parcels given out
1,861 Activity packs delivered
642 Well-being Phone calls to isolated people
