Brent Champions CIO Hub is a community charity working in Wembley and the surrounding areas of Brent. What it offers is deliberately practical: the things people actually need to get through a hard week, brought round by people who live nearby.

That means food bags with enough staples to cover a week for one person, along with toiletries, clean clothing, bedding and household goods, whether new or refurbished. It means SIM cards preloaded with six months of credit and 40GB of data when they are in stock, and laptops and phones supplied through Computers 4 Good. Winter warmer bags go out when the weather turns, and where someone needs a specific piece of equipment, including medical equipment, the charity tries to source it.

A lot of what Brent Champions does is not goods at all. Trustees visit people in hospital and take care of the errands that pile up while they are in there. They drive people to and from medical appointments, to the shops and out for the day, as a friend rather than as a service. They sit with people who are isolated, look after pets when someone is too ill to manage, and pass on pet supplies when they have them. They point people towards established support services and then follow up to check it actually happened, which is the step that usually gets missed. Alongside that there is a community garden to help run, and international evenings that bring people in Brent together across the cultures living side by side there.

The charity was registered in 2016 but only began operating formally this year, when it finally opened a bank account. Through the years in between the trustees carried on doing the work unofficially, often paying for things out of their own pockets. None of it was written down at the time, so Brent Champions arrives with the better part of a decade behind it and very little on paper to show for it.

Right now the trustees use their own cars to get people to appointments and to move donated goods around. A vehicle of its own is what the charity is working towards.