The London Irish Centre is the Irish Heart of London – the largest Irish community centre outside of Ireland and the largest Irish welfare charity in Britain. Our mission is to empower and enrich lives through Irish community and culture. Typically, each year we support over 2,000 individuals and have over 20,000 attendees at our arts, culture and educational events.

Over the last 10 months, our services needed to change in response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic to allow us to support those most vulnerable to the virus. We quickly remodelled our service delivery by supporting people through hot meal delivery, food parcels, advice, telephone befriending, a health and wellbeing advice line, library outreach and an online cultural programme. Our main priority remains keeping our community safe and looked after as we continue to work remotely at this time.

Here is just some of what the London Irish Centre has done during the Coronavirus pandemic.

• Become the first centre offering shielding to the vulnerable in Camden, providing essential food and supplies
• Delivered over 5,000 hot meals and 2,000 food parcels to those who were shielding across London. Our volunteer drivers were often the only visitors for many people over 3 months
• Made over 3,000 check-in calls to clients providing friendly, regular contact
• Helped over 200 people through our wellbeing advice helpline, taking the strain off the NHS
• Set up over 70 telephone befriending pairs who speak on the phone several times a week and who have rich links across the generations and made new friendships
• Won £363,596 in essential benefits for clients who are disabled and at risk of poor mental and physical health. Those who we helped claim benefits were on average £72 a week better off
• Worked with over 1,500 clients who are in desperate need of support
• 203 volunteers who gave 4,583 hours of their time
• Produced 72 online cultural events to an audience of 250,000 people