Like many experienced volunteer coordinators in London, Karen Chillman of Croydon Voluntary Action (CVA) found herself in March 2020 with a huge challenge. Croydon is another distinct outer London borough with such a strong sense of identity that in the referendum of October 2021, over 80 per cent of voters approved the move to an Elected Mayor system.
The first mayor is due to be elected in 2022. Croydon has for decades been the largest office and retail centre in south east England and the council, for the most part Conservative-run, has always been in favour of development. Recently, however, the council has announced cuts of up to 40% in its funding of the voluntary centre in the borough and Karen fears that significant areas of CVA’s work could well be obliged to close now.
Croydon Voluntary Action: Multifaceted support
Back in March 2020, however, the demands were obvious and pressing. As she recalls, the council was not ready to support vulnerable people in the first weeks of lockdown and therefore CVA immediately stepped in by establishing food hubs and recruiting volunteers to deliver food to residents.
As Karen says, a lot of elderly and low-income residents of the borough would never normally have excess food in the house, relying instead on frequent trips to the local shops, and thus the stay-at-home orders created an immediate issue as residents began phoning the CVA’s offices within a matter of days, asking for food.
Karen and her colleagues have years of experience of volunteering between them, and reliable systems in place which were improved significantly after the Croydon riots of 2011. The sudden increase in demand for their services
led them to call for volunteers, but as they already had experience in this area they were able to screen volunteers professionally from the start.
Very soon, they began to notice that a number of residents were phoning in to the food hub for individual items of food — it was obvious that these calls were being made more out of a sense of loneliness and isolation and to this day, CVA continues to speak regularly to over 150 residents who live alone.
Within the first few weeks, Karen’s team recruited 600 volunteers who began to provide services that were quite unexpected: at one point, 700 oxygen meters needed to be delivered; at another, someone was sent out to buy a bulk of men’s underpants, because homeless men, on being offered shelter and baths, were found not to have any spare clothing.
Croydon had accepted a large number of refugees and lockdown exposed the fact that many didn’t have a bank account or any kind of internet access. Those being accommodated in hotels had no cooking facilities in their rooms and while all hotels contracted to host refugee families were obligated to provide food, Karen’s team soon discovered that many weren’t; families were literally starving in their hotel rooms.
This kind of troubleshooting characterised CVA’s work throughout all the lockdowns. One elderly lady was unable to get her rubbish sacks down the path to the bins because her husband was in hospital with Covid.
A neighbour phoned in to complain about the rubbish piling up outside her house, so Karen explained as politely as she could that perhaps that neighbour could offer assistance. It was as though, she says, people were rediscovering what the idea of community actually meant.
Above and beyond
The only financial support CVA received during six months of operating with 600 volunteers to cover everything from food delivery to counselling, NHS equipment delivery to refugee support, was a £5000 one-off grant. And yet, despite this, and with the threat of closure facing them owing to the council’s budget cuts, CVA’s volunteer programme proved more successful in the borough than the national NHS volunteer scheme which was operated via a Smartphone app.
What Karen discovered is that the volunteers who joined up with CVA appreciated the local knowledge and support of the CVA team which they didn’t get from the more anonymous NHS app service. She hopes that community sense will survive, but she is fearful.
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