Christmas can be a difficult time for families of people in prison, asylum seekers & refugees, and other vulnerable people.  Quaker Christmas Parcels seeks to offer support and friendship at this time by providing food parcels.

This annual activity which has been running for 61 years happened again on 6^th & 7^th December 2024 at Selly Oak Meeting House and like the previous year we packed a little over one thousand food parcels.  Seventy percent of the parcels went via Probation to the families of prisoners and those known to be in great need by the Probation Service, while the remaining thirty percent was distributed to groups working with refuges and asylum seekers or with the homeless. 

Probation played their part as usual providing help with the unloading of deliveries on the Thursday and with collecting parcels on the Saturday.  Interestingly, one of the ‘unpaid workers’ on the Thursday was someone known to Friends who had taken part in a ‘Just Stop Oil’ protest and was serving part of her sentence helping us with ‘Christmas Parcels’. One of the joys of this annual event is the goodwill which it generates among all those taking part, not only with the packing but with the receiving groups which then deliver the parcels to their clients and also with the ‘unpaid workers’.   

Fundraising went well again this year with many generous individual and trust donations and also donations from some Meetings which held special Christmas Parcels fundraising events.

Special thanks are due not only to our volunteers and the Probation service but also to the Area Meeting office which helped with the production and circulation of the appeal letters and the printing of more than a thousand labels to go on the parcels.

Expenditure on the parcels this year was £18,250 or £18.10 per parcel whilst our income has been approximately £17,000 to date, meaning that we have not had to make a very substantial call on our reserves.