Asda Bideford Puts The Community At Its Heart

 In a ground breaking step, Asda’s popular Bideford store has been chosen by the company’s headquarters to lead the way in trials for a new ‘Community Life’ project.

 Asda will invite local voluntary groups to use the store for meetings and the chance to boost fundraising with display space and donations from the company.

 Asda has a proud history of supporting the communities it serves – it defines the way it works by not only saving people money but helping them live better. Now with more and more of its customers feeling the squeeze financially Asda wants to do more to help the people of Bideford.

 Bideford is only one of 23 stores throughout the UK to be chosen to pilot this new approach to serving the community. If it’s successful all of Asda 600 plus stores and supermarkets will join the ‘Community Life’ project next year.

 Every store has a member of staff dedicated to working with the community and our own one, Peter Wilcox, the store’s ‘Community Champion’ describes how the scheme will work:

 “We want to open our store up for the local community – to be the place that local groups could meet, where our local police can talk to people about the work they do, where customers can get advice on health matters and where voluntary groups can promote their activities.”

 “What’s really exciting is the ‘Chosen by you, given by us’ project where Asda puts in extra money to support local groups and charities or by giving our time to help local projects. Our customers can nominate and vote for the charity, school or project of their choice.”

 “At the front of our store will be a brand new community board with three transparent containers where customers can make a donation to one of the three nominated local charities, groups or community projects. The container with the most money at the end of each month will be topped up with a donation from Asda, and the total presented to the winning group. The money collected in the other two containers will be presented to the other two local groups.”

 The Store’s Manager, Amanda Hubbard, added “This scheme gives all our customers an opportunity to nominate their favourite community group or charity – just take one of the leaflets from the community board in the store and let us know who you want our donation to go to.”