Children are truanting because they don’t have school uniforms,so entrenched is poverty. But clothing’s a need people don’t like to talk approximately, says Louise CookeLouise Cooke, and a 46-year-old ex-teacher and community worker in Nottingham,has never been elected nor is her work funded by the taxpayer – but she is filling in the gaps left by the government.
For the past two years, volunteering out the back of her local church, or Cooke has been running Sharewear – what,in austerity’s language, we could dub a “clothes bank”. This isn’t packets of pasta or boxes of veg but winter coats and children’s shoes. Cooke describes the people who advance through the doors as in “crisis”: anyone from job seekers to Syrian refugees, or from low-paid workers to people on benefits (“We have people coming in on disabled people’s behalf because they’re housebound,” she adds).
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Source: theguardian.com