A total of £14,000 has been handed out to dozens of charities across East Devon by Citizens Advice.

The money was leftover from a Covid relief fund set up by Devon County Council, and Citizen's Advice was given permission to spend the money in line with the original requirements.

The groups supported include: Exmouth Exmouth Foodbank, Exmouth Friends In Need, Open Door, Cranbrook EX5 Alive, Ottery St Mary The Ottery Larder, Budleigh Salterton Seachange, Axminster Community Waffle, Seaton Re:Store, Broadclyst Broadclyst Parish Council, Honiton The Den, Honiton, Beer, Branscombe FoodSave, Sidmouth Sid Valley Help and the Salvation Army.

The money had to be spent on helping people dealing with hardship and in particular young families. They say they wanted to cover as much of the region as possible, so local groups were identified who have the knowledge, experience and ability to identify where those local needs are, and to best help the maximum number of people.

Each group received £1,000 to spend in an online shop. This gave them access to supermarket food vouchers, hardware stores, white goods and more. The emphasis was on food and fuel support for families, so we called it the Food and Fuel Fund.

Deputy Town Mayor of Ottery St Mary Town Council, said: "We were amazed at the range of projects that were happening across East Devon this summer. Groups were supporting children with food during the summer holidays, free clothing and school uniform projects were helped, after school groups were being created and a large bank of toiletries and cleaning products was established.

"We asked the groups to order vouchers roughly to the value of the support they would offer to each family, and so with 935 vouchers ordered, plus a washing machine, we are confident that over 1,000 people will have been touched by this scheme in the last few months. We know from our own experience that when we give people food or shop vouchers that the money they save will almost certainly be spent on other much needed items, and quite often this is spent in local stores.

"Each week we will be asking one of the groups to tell us a little bit more about what they do and how they used the fund to help their clients."