Care4Calais - Clothing for asylum seekers and refugees

Sorting clothes to provide packs to individuals in the local community who often arrive with nothing

Care4Calais is a volunteer run charity delivering essential aid and support to refugees living in the UK, Northern France and Belgium. We believe in a fair and tolerant British society and advocate for a welcoming and inclusive attitude towards refugees.

Operating year round, our focus is to provide warm clothing, bedding, food and medical assistance to people in desperate need. We also provide social support and interaction, including language lessons and sports and music workshops.

4 GoodGymers have supported Care4Calais - Clothing for asylum seekers and refugees with 1 task.


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Saturday 23rd November

Written by Sevan

Four GoodGymers arrived at a new task location this afternoon to sort donations and prepare clothes packs for refugees and asylum seekers in the local area. Care4Calais work to provide suitable clothing for those who arrive in the country without it and had asked for help to work through the bags they'd received.

Task owner Tamzin gave Kash, Steph, Divy and Sevan an intro to the charity, then guided them to different rooms, each of them piled high with boxes and clothes. Everything had it's place, but they had to know the system to know where that place was. Learning that took time. More-than-1-session sort of time.

There were 2 main tasks to get started with. Divy and Steph were asked to make up clothing packs for male clients. Meanwhile, Kash and Sevan would be sorting and sizing women's clothing donations.

Team Man's clothing packs were made up for a specific client to their size. Each one included underwear, a pair of trousers, t-shirts and a hoodie, which should have been straightforward. Actually, Divy spent a good chunk of the task trying to locate specific items that had gone walkabout so that the duo could keep building.

One floor up, Team Woman were separating donations by size and type, with a pile each for bottoms, tops and warm outer clothing. Any men's or children's clothes that they found were separated out, along with anything impractical. Part way through, Sevan was reassigned to organising space in the stock rooms and then onto sorting children's jackets

By the end of the task, some creative sourcing allowed Divy and Steph to create all of the mens' packs on the list. Kash had managed to process the women's clothes and Sevan had a neatly organised rack of storage bags containing children's clothes ordered by age. Everything was prepared for the next group of volunteers to pick up and run with.

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