Our projects range from community gardening to interactive street art, spoken word events and food bank collections. We are always on the look out for new and creative ways to bring kindness to peoples lives.
Since OAKS was born in the summer of 2015 we have worked with many community groups in London and beyond.
Food For Thought
Food For Thought is a night of music and raising awareness about the increasing number of people depending on the food they receive from food banks. Instead of paying an entry fee on the door, people bring a bag of long life food to go towards the collection. At the most recent event we collected enough food to produce over 540 meals for The Hackney Foodbank.
Redundancy, illness, benefit delays/sanctions, domestic abuse, debt, family breakdowns and paying for the additional costs of heating during winter are just some of the reasons why people go hungry. Plus there are thousands more who are just one pay check away from not being able to afford the food they need.
Free Cake giveaway
Free cake! OAKS volunteers donned their aprons and baked over 300 cakes to be given away to the unsuspecting public. We took to the streets of Brixton to hand out the cakes in under an hour and met some amazing people in the process.
Community Gardening
Changing the world one OAK at a time. We have organised volunteer action days with both The Nomadic Community Garden (NCG) and Poplar Community Garden to aid their missions of turning areas of wasteland into thriving gardens for local residents. Activities included helping build vegetable beds for the allotments, getting creative with pallets to produce furniture for the gardens, helping decorate a stage for local musicians and preparing and planting wild flower beds.
Our Projects.
Kindness Checkpoint
Public spaces where you can drop off acts of kindness, anything from food to house hold items you no longer need or use as a donation to someone in your community. We noticed items being left in this spot for others to take and were inspired to make it an official place where people can drop off an act of kindness. If you know of a place that would benefit from a Kindness Checkpoint, please get in touch and we’ll see if we can make it happen.
Women of Voice
A night of spoken word and music to celebrate International Women's Day and to raise money for Housing for Women, a charity that works to empower women through providing good homes and services and challenging inequalities faced by women. The headliners from the night were Poetic Pilgrimage, a British Muslim hip-hop duo who express themselves through the art of rhythm, covering personal and social issues.
Calais 'jungle' refugee camp
A group of volunteers went over to Calais for the weekend to help out at the refugee camp. We spent Saturday in the warehouse that supplied the camp, sorting donations and putting together emergency packs. In the lead up to the visit we crowd funded money which was spent on buying large quantities of essentials such a tooth paste and toiler paper. We also delivered over 1,000 condoms which were distributed in the toiletry packs and by the volunteer doctors who worked in the camp. We spent time in the camp itself meeting some of the refugees and helping them build temporary shelter to cook in. We were also then kindly invited to share a delicious meal with our new friends.
Acton O.A.P Bingo Club
This was the first ever OAKS. We got a group together and spent the day with the members of the Acton Old Age Pensioners Bingo Club. We donated food and prizes for the bingo winners and we decked out the hall with homemade bunting. To make the day special for the members, we hired a musician to come along and create a sing a long playing songs from the 50's and 60's. A few songs in, some of the ladies were up dancing in the middle of the hall with the volunteers. The hall was full of joy and stories about the good old days.
Interactive Community Street Art
We installed an interactive piece of art around a lamppost on Brick Lane, East London. Made up of wooden blocks, passers by were able to move them around and change the different body parts of the characters.
Tree Planting
We spent a morning planting apple trees with some of our younger volunteers at a Trees for Cities planting event in Southall. It was so beautiful to see young people enjoying nature and getting their hands dirty instead of playing computer games and looking at screens. Inspiring and encouraging young people to care about the environment is essential in promoting a more sustainable world, an issue extremely close to the roots of OAKS, as you can tell by our logo.