The art of giving

Each year Hand on Heart in Partnership with Beta Charitable Trust donate Winter Warmer Packs which include items like gloves, scarfs, blankets and essential toiletries to HARP and other homelessness organisations. When Monty and Zohra from Hand on Heart visited HARP’s day centre in late November, as part of their thirty day campaign to donate bags to a different homeless service every day for thirty days, we took the opportunity to have a chat about how they got started.

“Afzal Pradhan CBE was the one who, started it, he’s amazing. He travels around the U.K, he is out there every day” says Zohra.

“Hand on Heart has been going for several years. It started off as a small charity, some friends got together and were doing the donations from home, and it’s now grown. We are now serving throughout the country; Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Milton Keynes, Southend, Chelmsford.”  Monty tells me. “Maybe ten, twelve years ago, we saw that a lot of people were struggling at the time the financial crisis and we thought we need to do something to help people who are in that situation. We decided to get together and help however we could. It started off from the smallness of someone’s house. We used to pack in someone’s conservatory and slowly, we started to grow and the good thing about Hand on Heart is it’s not just, 3 or 4 people who do it, it’s actually the family who get involved. The kids get involved, they pack the bags for, the guests. This way they understand as well. So, as they grow up, they will do the same thing as the parents. That’s the idea.

We go out there, we ask people, homeless people you know, what they need for this year or whatever. And what they tell us is what we buy. It’s not just what we want to buy. It’s what they think they require in this cold weather and that’s what we try to purchase and put in the bag. We started with shopping bags, they weren’t working because people are moving around, so that’s why we went to rucksacks because that’s easy for them to put this stuff in.”

“They use the bags as well” says Zohra, “things like toiletries and everything goes in there that they need like hats, gloves, thick socks, jumpers”

The clear message from Monty and Zohra is that Hand on Heart is about fostering a spirit of community and giving in our future generations. As Monty says “It’s the art of giving. We want people to be generous.”­­