TSB Community Partner

The pensioner has run Oxford Community Soup Kitchen for 28 years, providing food, clothes and comfort to those in need

ICOLYN was walking home from work when she saw a homeless man rummaging in bins for food. The heartbreaking sight stopped her in her tracks.

Witnessing such desperation “sparked something” in the mum of five and, in that moment, the Oxford Community Soup Kitchen was born.

Nearly 30 years on, the kitchen has served up 45,000 meals to those in need, and Icolyn is still the driving force behind the community lifeline.

Her son Gary, 51, reveals that his mum’s altruistic roots stretch right back to her childhood growing up in rural Jamaica. He says: “She would cook for her teachers and families in the village.”

After Icolyn moved to the UK in 1965 and settled in Oxford, she continued to help other families.

Gary recalls: “I’d come THE O’Gorman family were holidaying in Florida when siblings Paul and Jean started worrying about their health. Back in England, Paul, 14, was diagnosed with leukaemia and Jean, 29, with breast cancer. The diagnoses came just 24 hours apart.

Paul died nine weeks later in February 1987. Before he passed away, he asked his parents Eddie and Marion to help other children with leukaemia.

The couple started raising funds for the Leukaemia Research Fund. Within nine months, they had organised a charity ball, and though home and there’d be someone in the kitchen that needed feeding.”

Icolyn’s passion for tackling poverty grew from her kitchen table to a thriving community centre when, in 1989, she saw that lonely figure hunting through bins. As she watched, she thought, ‘I have to do something’. Shortly afterwards she set up the Oxford Community Soup Kitchen.

It is open twice a week and provides three-course meals for vulnerable members of the community, as well as handing out essentials for the homeless.

“We’ve had people who were ready to commit suicide come here and it’s changed their lives,” says Gary.

Icolyn adds: “It’s our job to keep them alive and to make sure they have somewhere to go.”

Founded Children With Cancer UK with his late wife Marion, raising £230million in memory of their two children

Jean’s health had deteriorated, she was determined to be there. She died two days later. Shortly afterwards, Eddie and Marion met Princess Diana, they had raised £100,000 and she joined them to inaugurate a charity in their memory.

What began as a small charity has evolved into Children with Cancer UK, a major force in paediatric oncology, raising more than £230million and funding over 200 research projects.

Eddie, 83, says: “Every day in the UK 12 families are told their child has cancer and we want to save more lives.”

Set up a charity supporting farmers with their mental health after her husband Dan took his own life