The UK’s leading manufacturer of wheelchair accessible vehicles is marking six months of charity donations through its new charitable fund, where over £60,000 has been donated to more than 40 charities.
Allied Vehicles Group launched the Allied Vehicles Charitable Trust in March to bring together all the charitable work the firm undertakes and pledged to give £10,000 a month to charities and good causes. These were primarily in north Glasgow, where the company was born almost 30 years ago and still has its headquarters and a workforce of nearly 600.
However, demand from numerous charities was so great that the staff committee which decides on donations has directed some help to a wider area.
The Trust’s stated aim was to help Allied give something back to the community, and that has been borne out by the range of donations in its first six months.
Among the first recipients was the Courtyard Pantry – a Glasgow community facility operated by mental health charity Flourish House in partnership with Queen’s Cross Housing Association. Allied donated £5000 to the Courtyard Pantry, whose coordinator Dale Todd said would help expand its work: “This £5000 could provide 2000 shops that’s 20,000 items of food, and would be the equivalent, maybe of £20,000 worth of food”.
Another group among the first to benefit from the AVCT were Rossvale Thistle 2009s, a 20-player squad of young teenagers in north Glasgow, part of Rossvale FC, which helps promote teamwork to make a difference to young people’s lives. They received £1,200 to buy new home and away kit, which they finally took delivery of in July.
Scott Abernethy, an SFA-trained coach who helps run the team, said after their first games in the new outfits: “The boys looked amazing and felt great in the new kit, and their confidence was at a high. They came away with a great experience and love the new strips, and their parents are very thankful for the support from Allied”.
Charities trying to tackle poverty and homelessness featured strongly in AVCT’s first six months of giving.
Glasgow’s Pre-Loved Uniforms received £1,250 for their work collecting, cleaning, and distributing “pre-loved” school uniforms. Donna Henderson, a mother of three, launched the initiative in Balornock in 2017 and it was an instant success.
“We now work with 29 schools from Drumchapel to Easterhouse, the Gorbals to Castlemilk and three Co-op stores … our uniforms are still laundered and free, and we operate on a non-referral basis”, she said.
H4TH, a team of volunteers which has been helping homeless people in Glasgow for seven years, were given £2,500 to aid their work. Friends Mel Whitley and Mikaela McCormick started H4TH after Mel worked with a soup kitchen in Cadogan Street, Glasgow.
The charity now dispenses meals to all who need them, as well as helping local families with food parcels and clothing, children’s Christmas presents, and helps former homeless people furnish their new-found accommodation. Mel added: “The donation was a welcome and lovely surprise. It will make a huge impact on what we can achieve”.
A major social regeneration project also benefited from the AVCT – an ambitious £3.5m initiative by Ashfield Football Academy at Chirnsyde Playing Fields in Milton, which will see the area transformed with floodlit football pitches and associated facilities.
AVCT gave £5,000 to the project, which Allied owner and chairman Gerry Facenna said was not simply a box-ticking exercise: “The proposal is something of which the community could rightly be proud. Apart from the health and wellbeing benefits this development would bring would be the return of people’s pride in their neighbourhood”.
Charities helping families of people facing conditions such as cancer, cerebral palsy, and mental ill health have also benefitted from AVCT, along with schools in some of Glasgow’s most deprived areas, some of whose pupils the funding helped to go on holiday.
Another popular cause was a community group called the Milton Rattlers, who undertake outreach work amongst older residents in the area of north Glasgow.
The Rattlers – so-called because of the noise their various medications make when they move – were launched four years ago by six men and one woman whose combined ages totalled several centuries. A £750 donation from AVCT helped them with a street party for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations and an Easter bus run.
Raymond Hunter, the group secretary, said, “This is a fantastic donation from Allied Vehicles and will go a long way to helping with our street party and everything else we’ve got planned for the year”.
Gerry said: “We set up our Charitable Trust to give something back to the local community we belong to. While we are managing to do that, the exceptional demand we’ve seen, fuelled by widespread poverty and rising prices, has resulted in an expansion of our charitable giving through AVCT”.
“We’ll continue doing all we can to help ease the harm of severe poverty and its significant health effects in north Glasgow and beyond”.
