'It started with a cup of tea - now we help thousands'

When Victoria Armstrong moved to Manchester as a university student in the 1990s she started to notice there were people living in her community who "had no-one".

So she decided she wanted to help.

"I spent the first six months just putting on a kettle and putting bread in the toaster," the 53-year-old said.

Victoria, originally from Oxford, who had moved to Gorton after enrolling as a Fine Art student at Manchester University, started to host people for a cup of tea at her local church once a week.

Later she made it an official charity, founding Oasis in 2001.

"It started with cups of tea and toast," Victoria said. "Twenty-five years later and we have helped thousands of people."

Oasis now has its own centre, with 19 staff and 90 volunteers, running education classes, a free cafe, crisis support services, job clubs and a charity shop.

The Oasis Centre has spent the weekend celebrating its 25th birthday - made even better by the recent news that Victoria has been given the all clear from cancer after she was diagnosed 10 years ago.

"I'm a very different woman than I was 25 years ago," she said. "So the anniversary feels like a milestone on so many fronts.

"Last week I was given the all-clear and was told I was cancer-free.

"I didn't know if I'd even be here now.

"But I'm still here, still living in Gorton and I wouldn't be anywhere else.

"I love this community.

"I feel very proud we are now this big - but we're not there yet."

When Victoria first moved to Gorton she said she noticed deprivation in some parts of the community - meeting children who did not have school uniforms and asylum seekers struggling to support themselves.

"I was meeting people, sometimes out and about but sometimes through the church, who needed food," she said.

"I was finding out their stories and meeting a lot of people who had no-one."

Victoria said when her daughters began primary school, in 2001, she decided to provide the support of a family for people who did not have one and opened up a space at the Evangelical Church in Gorton.

"I knew that there needed to be a space created for people who didn't have that family support," she said.

"I hadn't got a clue what they needed but I knew I needed to start by loving, listening and learning.

"I certainly didn't want to be a middle-class person coming into people's trauma thinking I had a clue about what people needed.

"So I spent the first six months just putting on a kettle and putting bread in the toaster.

"It was just tea and toast and we got to know our community."

Soon after that, Victoria said she was being contacted by the council and others in the community about extending her support.

After telling her husband she planned to run the centre full time - she opened Oasis as a charity - which slowly began to grow, year upon year, from the services it provided, to the volunteers and staff it could take on and the scope of people it was able to support.

"Now we have holistic support, crisis support service, a wellbeing and community engagement service, adult education, pre-basic adult education, a work club, we have a mentoring and volunteering scheme and we have a charity shop," she said.

"But this didn't happen overnight.

"For the first five years we were firefighting.

"It was about reacting to people's needs on a case-by-case basis."

The Oasis centre has also become a place to celebrate culture.

"Something that's really important to us is bringing people together," Victoria said.

"We have become an incredibly diverse community over the last 25 years.

"It has been wonderful to embrace the diversity that we have.

"We do a lot of different things like Friday feasts - where different people from different nations - cook their traditional food and we dance traditional dances and give out fact sheets."

Now Oasis serves about 2,500 people a year - with no set criteria anyone is welcome, and the charity welcomes more than 1,000 new faces every year.

Victoria said plans for the future included a community healthcare hub - to help address a gap in access to medical care in the community.

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