BOLTON’S Urban Outreach charity is a magnificent organisation.

Rain or shine, all year round its volunteers work hard to help those less fortunate than most of us.

As reported in The Bolton News this week, the organisation has begun its annual summer school holiday initiative, ‘The Bolton Lunches’.

This is its fifth year and it aims to feed children who usually have free school lunches but could go hungry throughout the holidays.

The idea is to ensure that children across the borough continue to eat properly during the day, by packing thousands of lunches and then distributing them.

Volunteers will put together 50,000 packed lunches during the scheme, which began at the Central Baptist Church in Snowden Street on Tuesday.

This week, around 1,500 packed lunches – consisting of a sandwich (a choice of cheese, ham or tuna), cheese bakes, a cereal bar, fruit juice and a piece of fruit - will be prepared and sent out through a network spread across the borough.

The story shows what vital work Urban Outreach do and how committed their volunteers are; it provides an essential service as a safety net for the more vulnerable in our society.

Inevitably, the story brought out the commenters, quick to criticise, but slow to offer any real solutions.

Some asked why parents had not taken the responsibility to feed their children when a school meal isn’t provided in the holidays. That it wasn’t the job of the State to do so.

To be fair to the commenters, the very existence of such a scheme in 2018 does beg questions that need to be asked.

It is hard to argue with the notion that it is up to parents to make sure their children don’t go hungry throughout the day. I certainly believe it is a parent or carer’s responsibility.

But believing passionately that is what the situation SHOULD be, doesn’t alter the reality.

There are many reasons why these children might go hungry - and let’s not pretend we all know the circumstances behind every individual case, that would just be impossible and unreasonable wouldn’t it?

The fact is this: without ‘The Bolton Lunches’ initiative in place there are many children in Bolton who would have nothing to eat during the day in the summer holidays.

Of course we should ask why that is the case, it’s a perfectly pertinent question and one that needs to be addressed.

But in this era of anonymous comments, it is too easy to be harsh or just plain abusive.

It’s harder to get off your backside and do something about it or make a constructive suggestion.

Sitting behind a keyboard, making judgement and then washing your hands of the whole sorry situation doesn’t help the children, does it?

And when it comes down to it, they are the important ones in this story.

Without the work of Urban Outreach and its hundreds of volunteers, the sad fact is that they wouldn’t have a lunch during the day in the summer holidays.

Thanks to the community and local businesses working together as a team, those children WILL be having something to eat when they otherwise probably would not.

That is surely an achievement we must applaud.