Free Cakes for Kids Billericay is a community service for families within the boundaries of Billericay and Basildon who find it financially difficult to provide a birthday cake for their child.
Rachel Forrest launched the Billericay Branch on 1st August 2020 after hearing an interview on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show on Radio 2 the previous year which explained how a lady called Henriette Lundgren in 2008 saw an article in a magazine about a “Free Cakes for Kids” initiative in Georgia, USA and decided to adopt the model for her local community in Oxford, and so Free Cakes for Kids UK was founded.
With a large network around the country, Rachel started to explore further and discovered that the only other branches in Essex were in Harlow and Clacton-on-Sea, so she committed to setting up a local branch that covered Billericay and Basildon areas and started liaising with the local environmental health department to ensure that she had all the necessary systems in place to run a safe service.
They have 23 bakers who are signed up at present and Rachel is always looking out for more keen home bakers; anyone can bake and Rachel only asks that you sign up to their food hygiene and safety standards.
Free Cakes for Kids Billericay is incredibly simple; Rachel receives a referral form over email (referrer confirms the family meet a criteria) and she then circulates the date the cake is needed for and any theme etc to the volunteer bakers via a closed Facebook group; within minutes (sometimes quicker!) someone will offer to bake the cake and she’ll send over the details to the baker who then links with the referrer nearer the time to arrange delivery. Once the cake is made the baker will send over a photo which Rachel then posts in the closed and public Facebook pages to share the fabulous generosity of their bakers.
At the moment, Rachel only takes referrals from the Billericay Foodbank and this was more of a practical decision; setting up during the pandemic she wanted to be able to manage the referrals safely and she was not sure what the demand would be.
Rachel told CommunityAd about supporting Billericay Foodbank, “Supporting families in need is something that I feel very strongly about and to be able to work in partnership with the Foodbank who are seeing such a rise in demand for their support due to the pandemic is a real privilege as I know our cakes are making a huge difference to those who are really struggling.”
She also shared the special reactions from volunteers at the foodbank with us, “They are always blown away with the cakes we provide, we are lucky to have some very talented bakers who make our cakes, and they are so excited to be able to deliver them as they know how much it means to a young person to receive a cake in their favourite colour and theme on their special day.
“We had a particularly lovely reply from one family who sent in a photograph of their child with their cake and a lovely note, you could see how happy they were. It is lovely to know that we are helping to bring a little bit of happiness into families’ lives during a particularly tough year.”