Tesco grant brings books to life for Flintshire’s visually-impaired

A service which supports visually-impaired people in Flintshire has received a £2,000 grant thanks to the Tesco Bags of Help Scheme.

The funding for RNIB’s Talking Books, which provides audiobooks for the estimated 5,160 blind and partially sighted children and adults in the county, will allow the scheme to record more new book releases for users.

The Talking Books service is one of the RNIB’s most loved services with more than 25,000 titles available across all genres.

The on-demand service delivers books free of charge, providing users with access to a library of Braille and giant print books, as well as music and learning resources.

The extra Tesco funding will allow the charity to provide better support through its experienced library team and make its technology and reading advice more accessible through its volunteers in Flintshire.

RNIB Cymru Director Ansley Workman said: “Donations such as this from Tesco’s Bags of Help scheme are more important than you could possibly imagine for our services. Ensuring we have the newest releases available is vital as the initiative has a huge impact on the quality of life for those that are visually impaired.

“We’ll use the donation to record even more releases which will continue to inspire and offer a sense of freedom for those that need it most.”

Tesco teamed up with Groundwork to launch its Bags of Help funding initiative, which awards grants to thousands of local community projects every year.

Rhodri Evans, Tesco’s Community Manager for Wales, said: “Across Wales our Bags of Help scheme supports a huge variety of projects that are important to the local communities our stores serve, with more than £5m awarded in Wales to date. It is great to see another grant going to a group doing great work and we hope many blind and visually-impaired people in the community will benefit from this award.”

Since launching in 2015, Bags of Help has awarded more than £79 million to more than 26,000 projects all over the UK.

Customers are able to vote for a Bags of Help project in store using a blue token given to them at the check-out.

At the end of voting period, votes are collected and three groups in each of Tesco’s regions will be awarded funding.

For more information visit www.tesco.com/bagsofhelp.