A community kitchen was launched to help families hit by the pandemic and making them struggle to feed themselves and their children.

Abraham’s Kitchen was founded by Westbury Town Council admin team leader Julie Dyer and her colleagues after they were moved by stories of families struggling to feed their children.

They have begun delivering food bags with recipe cards every month to 50 low income families with young children in the town who they fear would otherwise miss out on hot meals.

The group was given £1,000 from the Wiltshire Community Foundation’s Coronavirus Response and Recovery Fund to give them a helping hand.

The fund has already raised more than £1.1 million and distributed £850,000 to more than 200 voluntary groups across the county to help them tackle the fallout from the pandemic.

Members of Abraham’s Kitchen had already planned to do something to help families before the Covid-19 outbreak but stories about people being plunged into poverty by losing jobs or having their hours cut made it even more important.

Julie said: “The idea came from my frustrations about what I was reading in the press and on social media abut children going hungry and I was really shocked by some of them.

“I found it quite upsetting that we are one of the richest countries in the world and this is happening. I kept asking ‘why are children living like that?’. I kept thinking ‘someone should do something about it’. I did some grant funding training and one day as I was driving to work, I just realised we could do something.”

She and her colleagues put a proposal to the town council and councillors pledged £500 to start the group off plus allowed it to do some of the preparation during work hours.

The group has also had funding from Westbury Area Board, the BA13 Partnership and Tesco but Julie believes it needs to raise £6,000 a year to continue providing food bags each month.

The August bags, which contained ingredients and a recipe for chicken korma, also had a feedback form so the group can gauge how they have been getting on with the recipes.

The next batch of bags, due out at the end of the month, will be a slight departure from the usual routine.

She said: . “We are very grateful to the Wiltshire Community Foundation for this support. The feedback from the councillors has been phenomenal too, they are so impressed with what we are doing.”

Find out more about the group by searching for Abraham’s Kitchen on Facebook.