Clydesdale Food Bank is ‘starving’ homeless charity

Donations to New Beginnings, the group set up eight years ago to provide basic household goods to homeless folk moving into new accommodation, have fallen off badly recently.

The reason founder and co-ordinator Mary McLelland gives for this could hardly be more ironic - the success of the Clydesdale Food Bank, a group, also Carluke-based, originally set up by New Beginnings but now operating as a separate, if complementary, organisation.

Mary said: “The trouble is a lot of folk think that we are the same organisation but we are not. Don’t get me wrong, no-one could be more delighted than I am that the food bank has been a success but that has led to a big drop-off in donations, both financially and in goods, to our cause.”

For more on this, pick up a copy of this week’s Carluke and Lanark Gazette.