Volunteers from Shree Swaminarayan Mandir Kingsbury spent Sunday 1st October 2017 collecting food items from donors at local supermarkets in support of a local foodbank, Sufra.
The volunteers used Sewa Day - an international day of action on which thousands of good-hearted people across the world come together to perform Sewa (literally translated as performing an act of kindness without expectation of reward) – to kick off their charity campaign, which will be at the heart of their Diwali and Hindu New Year festival.
The Diwali season is one of the most auspicious for the Hindu community, and the Mandir’s global spiritual leader, Acharya Swamishree Maharaj teaches, “Dedicating one's life to the service of others is the truest celebration of a festival”. Turning those words into action, the food collection was part of a wider charity campaign that the Mandir is hoping to inspire the community with. The food collections will continue over the Diwali period through to 21st October and people can continue to donate at the Mandir on Kingsbury Road, London. On the festival’s main day of Hindu New Year on Friday 20th October, the Mandir is working with DKMS to help “delete blood cancer” by enrolling the thousands of visitors as stem cell donors. And finally on Sunday 29th October, the Mandir is hosting its eleventh blood donation session, continuing its long-running campaign to inspire donors from the Asian community.
The Mandir has joined with the Sufra NW London Foodbank to help tackle what can only be described as a crisis. Over 1,182,000 three-day emergency food supplies were given to people in the past year in the UK – 436,000 to children – demonstrating the scale of the growing demand for the services of organisations like Sufra. The Mandir collected over 1,000 tinned food items, some 150 packets of cereal, nearly 400 packets of pasta, 500 packets of biscuits, 35 bags of sugar, as well as tea, coffee, juice, oil, long-life milk and essential toiletries, from hundreds of generous donors at Sainsbury’s stores in Hendon and Golders Green, and ASDA stores in Wembley and Colindale.
One of the youngest volunteers, 10 year old Smit Varsani said, “I really enjoyed asking all the shoppers to make a donation. They were all so generous. It was a long day, and I was tired at the end, but I knew that the little effort that I was making would be filling the tummy of a hungry person.”
