ALT Spirit of Manchester 2024 shortlist. Community and Buisiness Collaboration - Peninsula Group, Cracking Good Food & Microsoft NW Social Impact Team, Greater Manchester Law Centre & Clyde & Co. With an orange background.

ALT Peninsula Group image. A green teddy bear in the middle wearing Manchester Children's Hospital clothes, with a family stood around it.

ALT Cracking Good Food image. A group of volunteers stood around a table with donations of cooking equipment and food.

ALT Greater Manchester Law Centre and Clyde and Co logos.

ALT Inspired Taskforce. The Spirit of Manchester fund was instrumental in setting up our Sunday lunches which has been a great success! Being able to provide activity, more specifically lunch clubs, isn’t free. The cost of food items, publicity and room hire makes lunches like these too expensive for older people who rely on pension monies. Because of this, not many organisations provide a social lunch club such as this, let alone on the weekend. The Spirit of Manchester funding enabled us to provide this service and we are able to charge only a small affordable fee for the lunch (£8 only)! Any monies made from this project are put back into the Inspired Taskforce Charity to improve its services, be it to upgrade our equipment to provide a better Sunday Lunch service, or to improve our service elsewhere.

ALT Barnabus supports people who are rough sleeping, experiencing homelessness, or at risk of homelessness. Our support team, support centre, and resettlement tenancy project provide support to empower people to move off the streets and out of homelessness into a home. Sadly, we see a lot of hopelessness when people first come to see us and this cost of living crisis is tragically bringing many new people to us for help. During a period of just six weeks in April and May this year, we helped 352 people. The year before, in the same time, we saw 229 people so that is a 55% increase. We also supported 98 people we have never seen before; this time last year, that number was 53 so almost double. It is a tragic picture of how rising costs of living, spiraling rent, and mortgage costs have created a human cost of the devastating effects of homelessness.