Help for Families in Need

Alongside our ongoing community support, we run appeals through the year for families facing serious hardship, both in Manchester and further afield.

What Hardship Looks Like Here

It is rarely dramatic. More often it is a family managing month to month with nothing spare, where one unexpected cost — a boiler, a funeral, a delayed benefit payment, a car that fails its MOT — undoes a year of careful budgeting.

By the time someone asks for help they have usually already cut back on things nobody should have to cut back on. Several of the families we assist are in work.

How Support Is Given

On the basis of need, discreetly, and without requiring anyone to explain themselves publicly. Protecting a family’s dignity matters as much as meeting the need itself, and we do not photograph people receiving help or name them.

Practically, that has meant food parcels, help with a specific bill, essential household items, school uniform and equipment, and support with funeral costs.

If You Need Help

Contact us. You will speak to one person, what you say stays with the people who need to know it, and asking does not commit you to anything.

If we cannot help with something ourselves, we will try to tell you who can — there are local funds, charitable trusts and council schemes that people are frequently eligible for and have never heard of.

How You Can Help

Donations fund food parcels, essential items and emergency assistance. Volunteers help with collection, packing and distribution — and the second is consistently harder to find than the first. If you can give a few hours on a weekend, that is genuinely useful.

You can read more about why this work matters in our article on the Muslim duty to the poor, and about the difference between obligatory and voluntary giving in our guides to Zakat and Sadaqah.

See our current appeals, or get in touch to volunteer.