The founder of a group that helped kick-start the borough’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has praised the way the community has come together to deal with the crisis.

Emma Rigby, managing director of Love Your Doorstep, said the response from local people had been “absolutely incredible” after her group set up teams of volunteers to help vulnerable residents throughout Enfield.

Love Your Doorstep – established following the London riots in 2011 – was able to use its links to businesses and charities to quickly get food and supplies to those in need.

It is now working alongside the council as part of the Enfield Stands Together project to support vulnerable residents during the pandemic.

Ms Rigby said: “We have an audience of 27,000 local people and run the biggest community forum in the borough, and we work with over 700 local businesses.

“With the experience we have got working in the community for ten years, we had a pretty good idea of what needed to happen.

“I was able to pull a group of over 40 charities and community organisations to start communicating immediately. We quickly mobilised food to over 450 local residents.

“We also made a call out for volunteers and had over 700 volunteers, and we very quickly broke the borough into three locations.

“My biggest concern when I started up was if it was not managed properly, it would be chaos. We saw with Grenfell, people wanted to help, so we set up volunteers in separate area groups.

“We put those volunteers into three separate groups so we could do what we needed to do.”

Ms Rigby said the first three weeks were “extremely busy” dealing with calls from vulnerable residents.

“It was anything from ‘I can’t get out to get food’, to ‘I can’t get a prescription’, to family members saying ‘my 91-year-old aunt is living in Enfield and I can’t get to her’,” she explained.

“Enfield Council has set up their offering, and we’ve started to hand over to the council call centre, but we’re still working with charities and community groups.

“We’ve been delivering home-made lunches to North Middlesex Hospital and Chase Farm staff. We’re working with food banks and the Felix Project charity. It has been a huge operation.

“We will be working with Age UK, Carers Enfield, Enfield Women’s Centre and some schools with vulnerable families that can’t get food.

“We have a relationship with Tesco in Southbury Road, letting volunteers into shops at 9pm so they can buy supplies for self-isolating and vulnerable residents.

“We’ve delivered food to the mental health teams at Chase Farm, and they are taking food to the vulnerable mental health patients.

“There was a big delivery for North Middlesex Hospital. They wanted old mobile devices to help families stay connected with their loved ones.

“So we got the community to drop off old devices at The Beehive pub. The police got involved too – they have delivered their old devices.

“Love Your Doorstep was set up following the riots to bring the community back together, and it didn’t surprise me at all when Enfield pulled together the way it has. The community has been absolutely incredible. There are so many people offering to help.”

Information on how people can get involved with Love Your Doorstep can be found here.

Further information is also available on the Facebook page here.