Campaign: School Meals
Local Partners : Aston Villa Football Club & local schools in Perry Bar.
Outcomes: One Stop Shopping helps feed over 1,000 school children over the Easter & Summer Holidays of 2021 &2022.

School meals became a prominent topic after Covid in 2021, and assisting struggling families with children at home became critical. This was a particularly serious problem in and around Perry Bar. As a result, One Stop Shopping collaborated with Aston Villa Football Club and their foundation to deliver, support, and finance their local school meals project. One Stop also collaborated with our ASDA at the center to distribute a massive amount of food at no cost to the Aston Villa Foundation’s mobile kitchens, which traveled to school gates during the seasonal holidays to hand out hot takeaway meals to students from Perry Bar’s key local schools. During the Easter and Summer holidays in 2021, One Stop assisted in feeding over 1,000 school children, donating over £2,000 in food from ASDA and assisting in the sourcing and acquisition of food at cost, allowing many more mouths to be fed.

Campaign: The Commonwealth Games
Local Partners : Birmingham Council / Zone All Sports & Care
Outcomes: One Stop Shopping engages over 500 children with Sport and The Commonwealth Games, whilst also delivering FREE FRUIT for 1,000s of children throughout the Summer games.

Birmingham hosted the Commonwealth Games in August 2022. As part of the games engagement, One Stop collaborated with Birmingham City Council to engage and encourage local schoolchildren to participate in sports and learn about the history of the games. Over a four-week period, One Stop held FREE sports workshops within the shopping center in collaboration with the council and a Birmingham firm called Zone All Sports & Care, allowing parents to book their children into small sports sessions such as running, long jump, and javelin. This gave children who were unlikely to be affected by the Commonwealth Games the opportunity to interact with the spirit that surrounded them. As a center, One Stop also assured that children shopping with us during the games’ Summer season received FREE FRUIT from our games LIVE LOUNGE, which was built on the mall and provided a space for consumers to sit and watch the games live. During the summer of 2022, all of our sports classes for children were fully booked, allowing us to engage with over 500 local youngsters and introduce them to sport. Birmingham City Council also praised the campaign highly.

Campaign: Saving BMOS (Birmingham’s Oldest Musical Theatre Company)

Local Partners :  BMOS
Outcomes: One Stop Shopping raises over £20,000 to help save BMOS from bankruptcy. In addition, the centre also delivers over 500 personalised video messages from SANTA to local children.

One Stop Shopping Centre stepped in to help BMOS, one of Birmingham’s most beloved and undoubtedly oldest amateur musical theatre companies. Just after the pandemic, the organization issued a local call for help stating that they needed assistance in raising funds to pay off debts incurred as a result of an obvious loss in gate receipts during the lock-down. One Stop collaborated with BMOS for 12-14 months to deliver some unique campaigns that not only assisted the local community but also helped them collect funding to stay in business. Personalised messages from Father Christmas, Love Songs for Valentines shoppers, collaboration with schools for World Book Day to bring children’s books to life, and more were among the campaigns. One of the first and greatest was the personalised notes from Santa. Due to social alienation, One Stop set up a mini-North Pole recording studio in a vacant unit, which BMOS and their performers subsequently brought to life on video. We asked our customers to submit us their children’s names and Christmas wishes so that we could create and send them a personalized greeting from Santa, ensuring the magic of Christmas was preserved.

Campaign: One Stop Shopping – Dragon School
Outcomes: Over 1,000 families visited during the October Half-term of 2022.

During the October half-term of 2022, Dragon School was a creative installation built into a hitherto void unit at One Stop Shopping to animate the area and create an engaging and enticing FREE attraction for families in and around the centre.
With themed furnishings and displays, the unit was converted into a medieval castle. It began with six thirty-minute performances every day for the seven days of the half-term. Children and parents joined the mystical world of dragons, where they learned about their history from our dragon master while also crafting a sword or shield to take home. Dragon School was one of the most interesting events that One Stop has hosted, catching the community’s imagination. Over 1,000 children attended one of the programs over the course of seven days, with outstanding comments and praise received on One Stop’s social media sites.

Campaign: One Stop Shopping Summer Of Heroes

Partners: Local NHS & Key Workers
Outcomes: Local heroes were championed and recognised for their work throughout the pandemic, driving incredible CSR and social reach for the scheme, while recognising those that had done so much for their community during lockdown.

One Stop Shopping requested our customers to nominate their LOCAL HEROES throughout the summer of 2021. Shoppers nominated KEY WORKERS who went above and beyond during the lock-down via portals across our social and web channels. The scheme chose and celebrated 20 local heroes, telling their stories to our followers, treating them to a lunch and a voucher at the center with their families, and including them in our SUMMER OF HEROES event, which brought in real life size statues of Marvel and DC comic heroes, as well as superhero workshops for children. The campaign had one of One Stop’s best Summers on social media, with over 80,000 views in August, as we praised local teachers, paramedics, bin men, grocery employees, and others who assisted everyone throughout the lockdown.

Campaign: The Story Starts With Me

Partners: BMOS & Local Schools

Aims: To support and partner with local schools to promote World Book Day and drive reading & writing skills
Outcomes: Supported 5 local schools with reading books & stationery supplies, engaged over 120 children in creative writing & rewarded 3 children with a video and performance of their OWN story.

One Stop has spent the last two years developing a local program called “The Story Starts With Me” that focuses on engaging local schoolchildren and assisting local schools with reading and writing. We collaborate with five local primary schools, Grove Vail, Bar View Primary, Weckford, Brookvale, and Oasis Heath, and invite their students in years 2 or 3 to compose a short creative tale. Each participating class receives stationery coupons (from our tenants Argos, The Works, and Asda). 5 Children’s stories are picked and professionally read (as in BBC story time) by actors, with animation and graphics bringing them to life.

Campaign: One Stop’s Big Toy Giveaway

Partners: The Works (at One Stop) , Birmingham Council, Perry Bar Food Bank.

Aims: To support struggling families in our local area and ensure disadvantaged children received a present at Christmas.
Outcomes: Handed out over 300 presents & boardgames to families that registered for our support / also partnered with Perry Bar Food bank to distribute over 100 bags of essential food items in the final two weeks before Christmas.

In December, One Stop’s Toy Appeal allowed area families to register and receive ONE FREE TOY / BOARD GAME per household. We modeled this on the empty unit on the right, which we converted into One Stop’s Festive workshops. In addition to our toy drive, we pledged over 100 critical food bags to the Perry Bar food bank, which used our Festive workshop as a distribution point for part of these items. The Festive workshops saw almost 1,800 visitors in the final week, mostly from families looking for some FREE entertainment and arts & crafts, but also from food banks and toy drives.