Charity clothes hub gets £20,000 boost in funding

Charlotte Spooner and Amanda Crossley work on the project together. The initiative aims to make clothes more accessible for patients

A pre-loved clothes hub for mental healthcare inpatients has secured thousands of pounds of funding.

The Community Clothes Cycle started in January last year with staff, family and friends donating clothes for patients receiving care in the Linden Centre and Crystal Centre in Chelmsford, Essex.

The National Lottery is set to give the project £20,000 and the service's founder, Charlotte Spooner, said she hoped they would be able to reach more Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust wards in the next two years.

"We were working on the peer support pilot at EPUT and we noticed there was a real need for some patients who didn't have many clothes," she said.

Ms Spooner said she had been organising clothes swaps for fun with her friends but decided to donate some of their pre-loved items to patients.

They then started holding swaps for the general public to donate, as well as selling clothes online to raise money to buy new clothes for patients.

Amanda Crossley, who also works on running the project, said: "We've seen the emotional impact of actually having new clothes is really amazing.

"We all know when we go to a clothes shop and we get something really nice," adding that it "benefits our own mental health".

"So to see the impact and how it's affecting everyone else on the ward is amazing," she added.