Supporting mums and under-fives in temporary accommodation in Newham. Registered Charity Number 1176267.
Last Saturday we joined Clapton Community Football Club at their May day Fundraiser party.
We sold merch, spread awareness about our No Child in a Home Without a Kitchen campaign, and our mums and minis joined us for face painting, bouncy castle, and games.
At every match Clapton community football club run a hygiene bank collection for us. We have a brand new banner, so please look out for it and donate if you are able to!
We are thrilled to celebrate the incredible achievement of Helen, from our partner organisation JustIdeas, who completed the 2025 London Marathon in support of The Magpie Project — raising an astonishing £100 for every mile she ran. That’s over £2,600 to help provide vital support for mums and under-fives.
Everyone at The Magpie Project is so in awe and grateful for Helens efforts! Reflecting on the day Helen shared:
“I thought a lot about my lovely Mum today – I was running for amazing mums, ours as well as those I was fundraising for. Something kept me going – but also kept me safe – in a very tough second half.”
Thank you, Helen, and thank you to JustIdeas for continuing to stand and work with us!
There is still time to sponsor Helen on her Just giving page:
This week we hosted Iftar at The Magpie Project. We gave our kitchen over to 2 mums to cook and everyone was welcome to join us to eat.
Everyone enjoyed a delicious meal of fruit, dates, chickpeas, spicy vegetable fried rice, Batata Vada and samosas.
This was especially important for us to do as many of our mums are observing Ramadan in a hotel with no access to a kitchen at all. Sign our petition below to ensure no child is in a home without a kitchen.
Creating a safe space to play is a priority for us at The Magpie Project particularly as many of our minis do not have this option at home, in cramped accommodation with no outside space . As the sun begins to come out play gravitates outside which means more sand, water and climbing.
Last week Westfield treated our mums and minis to a delicious afternoon tea to celebrate the new Magpie Project building. The Westfield team welcomed mums, served cakes, poured drinks, cleared plates, played with children and held babies!
Everyone left smiling and very full, as mama D said we felt “highly hosted”. We loved welcoming Westfield to our new building and celebrating our 4+ years of partnership.
We have spent the last week unpacking and getting our new space ready to welcome our mums and minis back into. Our café area is fully stocked with new cutlery and crockery, tables set out with our beautiful colourful chairs very kindly donated by OMK and we have set up baby change areas. Toys that felt huge in our old building now feel tiny in our big new play space. Everything is still a work in progress and we are so excited to work and collaborate with our mums and minis to curate the space together.
We couldn’t have done it without our amazing volunteers and everyone who donated something or contributed their time.
As we return rested from our winter break, we can look back at the success of our Christmas event! We hosted our Christmas giveaway across 2 days, which featured presents and a stocking for every child, a present for mums and a hamper for each family. Despite the torrential rain more than 215 families joined us, mums filled their bags and buggies with gifts and goodies while minis drank hot chocolate! There was even an appearance from Mother Christmas herself, along with her elf helpers!
We got to show off our amazing new song ‘The places you’ll go’ which was written and recorded with London Rhymes, it didn’t quite make Christmas number one, but we are very proud of it!.
We danced and sang and ate lots of delicious food provided by our amazing partners Community food Enterprise and City Harvest.
The support we received from the community and our partners this year was phenomenal, we had more than 400 children’s presents, 200 mums presents, and 280 food hampers donated. For this we have to thank Wanstead WI and Westfield for the presents for our mums and Hasbro, Solotech at ABBA Voyage, Bancroft Rugby Club, and The Wanstead Charity for all the gifts for our minis. Our amazing local bookshop Newham Bookshop also curated a selection of books for us using community donations and 100 books from our partners Discover, Enabled Living and a community member also funded books. All the books were put into stockings handmade by our amazingly talented quilting volunteers and given out to every child by Mother Christmas.
We are so lucky to have so many lovely volunteers, who joined us the day before to sort, wrap and age label all the presents. As this was going on a constant flow of hampers arrived from members of the community. Their support continued across our giveaway days as volunteers helped to distribute presents, give out nappies and serve hot chocolate to our Magpie families. A big thankyou to the volunteers who joined us from our partners Papier, Solotech at ABBA Voyage, Discover and Hadley. A special shoutout to Enabled Living who became elves for the days! We really could not have done it without you all!
Once every half term we pause our busy stay and play sessions for a week to host our Clothes Club event. The Clothes club, gives our mums the opportunity to ‘shop’ for clothes and coats for their minis, and some essential toiletries.
We want the event to not only address the practical needs of our families but to give them a dignified experience where they can exercise choice, so we work to ensure each family has a wide range of new and barely worn clothes to choose from. Our aim is to make this a relaxed and enjoyable shopping experience where the mums are free to be as fussy as they want!
At this Clothes club we also provided each child over 1 with a £40 Clarks voucher, we choose to do this so they can get a well fitted and comfortable pair of shoes for their growing feet. We think all our children deserve to have new and comfortable shoes, and we have a horror of inappropriate, second hand or broken shoes on our beloved mini’s feet.
In November we had more than 125 families come to Clothes club, this would not have been possible without support from our partners and volunteers. We are very fortunate to collaborate with amazing organisations like, Little village who generously provided us with 30 bags of quality checked winter clothes and Community Food Enterprise who sourced us 100s of tote bags our mums could pack their shopping in. We also want to say a huge thankyou to Irons foodbank for providing us with sanitary items to give out to our mums, which are so often a forgotten necessity.
And not to forget all our amazing volunteers both Magpie regulars and from Papier, who meticulously sorted and quality-checked public donations. Their hard work ensured that the items were folded and presented beautifully, ready for our mums to explore and choose from!
The children were also involved, books were given out to everyone and healthy refreshments provided!
If you would like to donate great quality clothes to our next clothes club here’s how.
If you would like to buy new clothes for our minis please get in touch.
Or if you are a football fan, do go along to a Clapton Community Football Club match and donate to our hygiene bank there.
“In my experience, the first thing was to open an online account. Some online banks will take a biometric card. When you download the app, you immediately get your account number and sort code, so you can apply for universal credit. Then, I applied for a provisional license. You have to be careful when you apply to both of these. Make sure you confirm your universal credit first, before you send your ID for your provisional license, because it takes a few weeks for them to send it back and you won’t get paid until you send your ID to universal credit” Magpie Mums
Proof of address is something that proves where you live. It’s generally a document from a trusted source that has recently been sent to your home address.
Government-issued letters
Company-issued letters
Proof of address documents can be split into two types:
Remember to always use printed bills and statements which are not older than 3 months
“Proof of address is very challenging, especially when you’ve just got status. You’re probably not in accommodation yet so haven’t had any bills or anything. You might have to wait for a bill. One bank accepted a housing letter but not all banks would accept that.”
“Try and find your old letters. You never know when you will need them. Don’t throw away important papers (anything that can
prove who you are and what you’ve been up to) and keep them somewhere. I needed proof of address for the past 5 years. Imagine if I was th
rowing things away. Keep letters for hospital appointments and from school etc.”
Magpie Mums say:
Proof of identity is something that proves who you are. It will most likely be an official document with your full name, date of birth and a photo.
Examples of proof of identity:
Once you receive legal permission to stay in the UK, you will usually get a BRP. Your BRP includes your name, your date and place of birth, your fingerprints, a photo of you, your immigration status and information about your access to public funds.
If you lose your BRP or it gets stolen, you must report it and apply for a replacement within 3 months. If you don’t do this, you could be fined up to £1,000 and made to leave the UK.
You can use a valid passport as proof of identity. If your passport has expired and you want to renew it, your country’s consulate should be able to assist you.
You may be able to use a PDL as a proof of identity or address. You can apply for a PDL online which costs £34. After a successful application, you will get your provisional license and your identity documents posted back to you separately. Find out more here.
Magpie Mums Say: “Make sure you confirm your universal credit first, before you send your ID for your provisional license, because it takes a few weeks for them to send it back.”
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