Portadown Wellness Centre and Tesco helping people in crisis

The organisation was formed in September to provide support and empowerment to people in Portadown and the surrounding community struggling with mental health, addiction, physical illness, loneliness, or isolation.

In March of this year, the Centre responded to the community’s requests for broader support by implementing a food parcel delivery operation to support struggling households. The food parcels are distributed amongst the community to recipients including local Simon Community Hostels, self-isolating elderly residents, and staff at Craigavon Area Hospital, amongst many others.

Every evening, volunteers from the charity visit five Tesco stores across Portadown, Craigavon, Banbridge, Bridgewater and Newry to collect food items, which would otherwise go to waste, through the FareShare Go programme. To date, the Portadown Wellness Centre has collected 6,340kg of food from Tesco stores since the start of the pandemic, which equates to 15,100 meals.

Alongside the daily food collections, Tesco Portadown has helped the organisation deliver essential items to the elderly.

As people began to isolate at the end of March, Tesco Portadown Store Manager, Aidan Furey, donated a collection of items to the charity to allow them to deliver a loaf of bread, toilet roll and a number of tinned products to 100 elderly residents in Portadown who live independently.

Alan McDowell, the Founder and Manager of Portadown Wellness Centre, who started the organisation due to his own experiences with ill mental health, said: “Tesco is an extremely community-oriented business, and it’s obvious that there is a deep passion from staff to care about our people.

“Our daily collections from Tesco are made easier by the dedicated staff who always ensure products are ready on time for collection, and always give generous words of encouragement and kindness to our volunteers.”

Moving forward, Portadown Wellness Centre hopes to see the food delivery operation flourish in the hands of the community.

They plan to hand the food delivery operation over to the community to run, so that the centre can transition back to its original mental health support services.