Sara Lee Trust’s Silverhill charity shop.

Wanted: volunteers for Sara Lee Trust

As it prepares to open a new charity shop in Ore village – its fifth – the Sara Lee Trust is on the look-out for volunteers to staff it. Nick Terdre reports.

The new shop will be located in the middle of Ore village at 460 London Road – next to the church, area retail manager Emma Dell tells HOT. It is due to open in late February, by which time the trust hopes to have recruited some 20 volunteers to help run it. A shop supervisor has already been appointed.

The normal routine for volunteers is to work either the morning shift from 9am to 1pm, or the afternoon from 1 to 4pm. As the shop is quite large, ideally there will be a pool of some 20 volunteers, enabling at least three-four staff to work each shift.

Work may be either ‘front-of-house’, serving customers, or behind the scenes, preparing donated clothing and other goods for display in the shop. Most of the volunteers are women but men are equally welcome, Emma says.

At present Sara Lee Trust has four shops – one each in Hastings and St Leonards and two in Bexhill, where there is also a donations centre. The trust works closely with St Michael’s Hospice and was also hit by the arson incident there last year – its main office was in the hospice, so these functions are temporarily spread between several other locations. Restoration of the office in the hospice is not expected before next year.

In the meantime the trust’s Snowflake campaign backed by comedian Jo Brand, in which supporters decorated snowflakes and had them displayed in the shop window in exchange for a donation, recently ended.

However, demand for its services remains strong – the trust describes its mission as providing complementary therapies, counselling and creative therapies to people in Hastings and Rother who are living through cancer and other life threatening illnesses – and the trust is reliant on its own efforts to fund its activities. Every penny raised in the shops goes toward this, Emma says.

Interested in volunteering with Sara Lee Trust? Call Emma Dell on 01424 272 519 or drop in to any of the charity’s shops: at 41A, Cambridge Road, Hastings; 1 Sedlescombe Road North, Silverhill, St Leonards-on-Sea; 61 Western Road, Bexhill and 9 Endwell Road, Bexhill.

More on volunteering with Sara Lee Trust.

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