27-year-old Tanisha Bramwell, a renowned philanthropist, activist, and a social worker, known to be on the roads 24×7 helping those in need, has taken up a new cause. A cause to ensure that the children in need, remain well fed and active, during vacations.
Tanisha’s current project, ‘Youth Holiday Summer programme’ is on currently and is partly funded by the Kirklees council.
“The main motive of this programme is to target children in need,” Tanisha tells Asian Standard.
“A lot of children rely on free school meals and breakfast clubs. During the six-week period of the holidays, that’s not running. Our aim is to engage social individuals and provide free meals. We have been funded 20 spaces by the Kirklees council, the only unfortunate part about that is we are receiving up to seventy kids per session, so we have to accommodate extra spaces through sponsorship to enable us to take on newer people.
“We are running on a four-by-four basis, we run four hours a day, four days a week for four weeks, we are running two projects, one in Dewsbury and the other in Ravensthorpe. So right now, we are running sessions, eight hours a day, four days a week for four weeks.”
This charitable project is not new for Tanisha Bramwell, it is one of the many projects or helps she provides across the week. Tanisha has been engaging with the community and helping them since she was 17 years of age.
Tanisha speaks of her motivation to helping people “My motivation comes from ensuring that there is help available to the young people and families in need, there is a support system for them, because it is important, that if one has a support system, it will enable them to get better in life and get the right opportunities out there. So that’s where my motivation lies.”
Image: Tanisha Bramwell twitter
Her decade old journey of helping people was full of challenges and unwarranted threats too.
“We have people that do not think that we are doing enough. We have people that don’t believe the work we are doing. I’ve had harassment and faced threats.
“However, there’s always more that can be done, tomorrow is a new day and tomorrow there’s more people to be helped” Tanisha says.
Speaking of threats, Tanisha says, “Actually its quite a lot, coming from strangers. I’ve actually had a lot of death threats too, especially when people don’t feel like we are responding in time or doing enough for them.
“Some of the threats have actually resulted in injunctions and convictions,” Tanisha adds.
Last year in May, an individual, Carl Ramsay, was convicted after he pleaded guilty to sending Tanisha racially motivated and malicious messages, which included death threats.
Speaking of financial challenges in helping out people, Tanisha says that its “almost every week” that she and her team has to use personal income to attach the strings and help people in need.
“We haven’t had funding in almost a year, we are running on donations, so we have to use our own money to carry on.”
When asked if she has had any financial support from the council, Tanisha said: “No, I see no support at all from the council at all.
“The only support that I see, from the council is allocation to Kirklees council adult social services or youth workers, they send people to us, like social workers or food packets.
“But we don’t receive any funding from the council.”
Encouraging people to help the society, Tanisha says, “If you want to make a change, do it, don’t wait around. That would be my advice. There’s no point of waiting for someone else to do it. If you want the change, just be that change.”
