Michelle Richardson, front of house at the bell inn, hungry horse, yeovil, somerset 

When Michelle Richardson started working front of house at The Bell Inn in Yeovil during the pandemic, she didn’t imagine that within weeks she’d be making Christmas happier for underprivileged children.

 

I started working at The Bell Inn in Yeovil in October 2020 after being made redundant due to Covid-19. I had been working as a service co-ordinator for a machinery repair company for 10 years, but there had been very little communication about what was going on while I was on furlough, so the news came as a shock. It was a very worrying time. I’d never been unemployed before and I was concerned about having no money coming in.

My sister-in-law works at The Bell and told me that there was a job going working front of house. It’s my local Hungry Horse and we always enjoy meals out with the kids there because it’s really family friendly. So, although I didn’t have hospitality experience, the pub is really familiar to me. I applied and was so relieved when I got the job and started straightaway. I was a little bit nervous on my first day, but everyone was so lovely. I shadowed another team member to learn the ropes and settled in very quickly.

Money worries

In the past I’ve planned and organised a few parties, weddings and other events and the manager here knew that I enjoyed that kind of thing, so a few days in I was asked if I’d help with fundraiser planning. Of course, with Christmas just seven weeks away thoughts immediately turned to festive fundraising. It occurred to me that having been worried sick about money prior to starting my new job, and scared we’d be having a bleak family Christmas if I didn’t find work quickly, that there must be lots of other people in similar situations.

In fact, there were thousands of people facing unemployment and an uncertain Christmas. The news was full of headlines about the increase in poverty and the number of families using food and clothes banks escalating. The amount of people who were really struggling financially was heart breaking. With potentially so many Christmases massively impacted by the virus we wondered if there were any charities in the area doing a Christmas appeal that we could get involved with.

Festive fundraising

We quickly found out that Operation Christmas was being run by the Salvation Army. It was a scheme where you buy a present for a child, deliver it to a drop-off point for collection, and the Salvation Army distribute to kids who’d otherwise go without. It seemed perfect, so we decided to use the pub as a drop-off point and get word out to raise awareness around the appeal.

Just two weeks after I joined, on the 22 October, we put up the biggest Christmas tree we could find – it took over a corner of the pub – you couldn’t miss it. We decorated it and wrote gift tags which gave details of the type of present on a child’s wish list. We dotted them all over the tree and the idea was that if you wanted to get involved you took a tag from the tree, bought the gift and then dropped it back into us. It was a busy time, so I was hopeful that if we communicated the event effectively, we’d manage to get a good number of gifts donated for underprivileged families.

Second lockdown

And then we went into the second lockdown on 31 October. We were worried because the appeal had only been going for a few weeks so we plastered the event all over social media, telling people they could still donate gifts via The Bell and if they messaged us on Facebook, we would organise drop offs while the pub was shut. Donations came flooding in. We had over 250 Christmas presents donated in total and when I saw them all it actually gave me goosebumps.

When we reopened in December it took several car journeys to drop the gifts off to the Salvation Army. They were blown away by the generosity of our local community. Donations included everything from baby clothes to hair straighteners for teenagers. It was so humbling because everyone was going through difficulties, and yet they still found the time, money and good spirit to give to a child they’d never met.

A few weeks later we went into the third lockdown, so I didn’t actually get to experience working at Christmas at all. But I felt so lucky to be working for Greene King. I’d previously worked for a company that kept everything to themselves and didn’t communicate with staff, and Greene King was the opposite. The information that came out to keep team members up to date during uncertain times was amazing – and it made a big, big difference to everyone.