City Hearts Shefffield: More than 100 Easter eggs donated to help modern slavery victims

More than 100 Easter eggs were given by the firm to City Hearts, a Sheffield charity helping victims of modern slavery.

The charity works with the Government to provide refuge for victims of modern slavery across nine different locations in South Yorkshire, the north east and the north west.

When victims arrive at City Heart, the charity gives them clothes and toiletries, helps them book medical appointments, provides them with English lessons if needed and gets them enrolled onto college courses.

Communications officer Dianne Peters said: “It’s all about rehabilitating people’s lives.”

Tony’s Chocolonely, which aims to keep its chocolate supply chain 100 per cent slave free, regularly donates chocolate to City Hearts’ clients, with each safe house resident receiving a bar of Tony’s chocolate on their pillow when they first arrive.

This year, the company has also donated 150 Easter eggs, which will be given to all the safe house clients and their children, across all nine sites.

The Modern Slavery Act, which was designed to combat modern slavery in the UK and consolidates previous offences relating to trafficking and slavery, was introduced in 2015.

Ms Peters said each person can be with the charity from two months to two years depending on how long the conclusive grounds decision – a process that decides who is a victim

of slavery and who is not – takes.

Ben Greensmith, UK director for Tony’s Chocolonely, said 1.5 million children are working on cocoa farms to make the chocolate we enjoy.

He told how the firm is deliberately a commercial organisation rather than being an NGO (non-governmental organisation) as it wants to demonstrate to big companies that it is possible to make delicious ethical chocolate and profit.

He said Tony’s looks for like-minded partners such as City Hearts.

City Hearts service manager Allison Hilton said: “Little gifts such as chocolate bars might not seem much to us, but to our clients it gives them hope that the world does have kindness in it.”