MORE than 55,000 meals have been handed out by a food bank which was set up in March by a group of professionals who were inspired by a sermon at their mosque.

Crescent Food Bank, on Prospect Street, off Blackburn Road, is run entirely by volunteers and receives donations from supermarkets, firms and individuals.

Not only does it support people by providing food parcels, but it works closely with other organisations such as Bolton at Home to tackle related issues including period poverty.

It was started by 12 professionals with backgrounds including medicine, finance and education who met at their mosque, Masjid-e-Noorul Islam.

Following a motivational New Year’s Eve sermon by their Imam, the group decided to come together to help tackle food poverty.

One of the founding members, Farid Ahmed, said: “We weren’t really close friends before, but in January we started to have conversations about food poverty and what we could do. We all live in Bolton so we wanted to give back to our community.

“The mosque kindly gave us the building to use next door and we have vaults to store all the food in.

“Supermarkets have been amazing and we couldn’t do this without them. We’ve had donations from Asda, the Co-op and Greenhalgh’s to name but a few. Their help has been magnificent.

“People can be referred to us by the Council’s welfare teams or they can come directly to us via our website, we accept anyone, all we ask is that they have a genuine need for the food bank.”

Crescent also works closely with other charities in the borough, including Urban Outreach.

They also raised £1,500 for the Free Flo Project, set up to tackle period poverty.

Farid added: “For Eid recently we collected and donated toys to Derian House Children’s Hospice and we’ve also collected items for rough sleepers, including sleeping bags and rucksacks.

“We help anybody from any walk of life and don’t have any limits.

“During the summer holidays we are preparing parcels to help families with children on free school meals.

“It breaks your heart when you see what some of these families go through, we want to do anything we can to help.”