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Looking back at Big Coat Day 2020

Big Coat Day is the Club’s annual initiative to collect spare warm clothing, toiletries and other items so that it can be distributed to those who need it most – across the City and further afield.

With our FA Trophy success creating an away trip to Barrow rather than the scheduled league fixture against Stafford, we changed the Big Coat Day to our home game against Sheffield FC on the 21st January. With final donations arriving right up until kick-off, this years’ total reached 8 tonnes – a fabulous achievement which the club and its supporters should be hugely proud of.

Big Coat Day has been a regular, and hugely popular, feature of the club’s community work since 2005 and down the years the club has worked with a number of charities to help those most in need in the Manchester area. This year the club worked with two key partner organisations – Loaves and Fishes and Hope Direct. Hope Direct have distributed the clothing to families living in hardship in the north of the city as well as to children in Sierra Leone which has been hard hit by flooding and an ebola virus outbreak.

Representatives of Loaves and Fishes were at Broadhurst Park on the 21st to load the final items and get them quickly out to the people they work with. They were joined by Councillor Paula Appleby and Peter Tavernor as well as Chair of Board Adrian Seddon, his daughter Amy and Vinny Thompson who leads the work of the club in the community.

This year, we also worked with The Water Adventure Centre (WAC) which is a charity based in Tameside which works primarily with younger people in areas of deprivation to build confidence and self-esteem through outdoor activities. Allan Donoghue, a Trustee at WAC said, “the sleeping bags and warm clothing will be a massive help to increasing the opportunities we can create for the young people we work with”.

Each winter it’s reckoned that around five thousand excess deaths occur in North West England simply because of a lack of heating or warm clothing. That translates to roughly one death every thirty minutes or so during the winter months; deaths that shouldn’t happen and that can be prevented relatively easily.

All the effort from our supporters and business friends helps to reduce this number and we thank you all for your support.




First Posted ~ 11:47 Mon 3 Feb 2020
News ID ~ 8628
Last Updated ~ 22:45 Thu 4 Feb 2021