The Sikh New Year festival, Vaisakhi took place this week (April 14) and to celebrate colleagues and customers from both the Reading and Newbury Metro Bank stores organised a food donation drive.
“As the UK’s best community bank, Metro Bank is integral to many local fundraising events in Berkshire”, explains Store Manager, Hardeep Kaur. “We reached out to our colleagues and customers to support our food drive to help celebrate one of the most important dates in the Sikh calendar.
“One of the fundamental traditions of Sikhism, is for the temple community kitchen (langar) to serve meals free of charge to anyone - irrespective of religion, gender, race or economic status. Thanks to everyone’s generosity our donations to two local food banks – ReadiFood and the West Berks Food Bank will help feed many local families.
Hardeep and this team have had lots of support from Metro Bank customers:
“This is a lovely initiative, it’s great to see how much everyone has donated and I’m happy that I could contribute as it is Ramadan and Vaisakhi happening at the same time and it’s all going to a good cause.”
“Thank you for looking after our community – this is great to see.”
Readifood is an independent food bank providing food parcels to those in severe need in the greater Reading area which operates as part of and on behalf of the churches of Reading to provide services which individual churches alone would not be able to provide.
West Berks Food Bank in Newbury provided nearly 9000 seven-day emergency food supplies to local people in crisis last year and is supported by over one hundred volunteer staff.