Help keep our Milk Mobile out on the roads delivering urgent donor milk
Can you help us reach our goal?
Our beautiful electric vehicle – affectionately known by the team as ‘The Milk Mobile’ (or ‘Evie the EV’) joined the Hearts Milk Bank team in November 2022 with the generous support of West Herts Charity Trust, John Apthorp Charity and Swansea University.
Since then she’s been out on the roads with our volunteers, delivering urgent donor milk to hospitals and families at home, collecting milk from donors and turning heads wherever she goes! Many of her journeys include the monthly transportation of hundreds of litres of milk from our donor milk hub at the Singleton hospital in Swansea, with the generous help of Professor Amy Brown who facilitates our Swansea hub. The milk is taken to a handover point in Leigh Delamere, where it is collected and taken onwards to the Hearts Milk Bank HQ in Hertfordshire for pasteurisation and testing.
With demand for donor milk sharply rising, so has the Milk Mobile mileage, and running costs. We rely upon charitable donations to keep her out on the roads, so if you can donate a gift towards more miles of milk, we would be so grateful.
Our Swansea donor milk hub
In partnership with Swansea University and Swansea Bay University Health Board in January 2022 we opened the first donor milk hub in Wales. The hub, located in Swansea’s Singleton hospital will enable more families in Wales to receive and donate human milk, and the research evaluation of its impact is the start of an exciting innovation in perinatal health for women across Wales and beyond. Professor Amy Brown, director for the centre of Lactation, Infant Feeding and Translation (LIFT) at Swansea University said: “We were delighted to recently receive funding from HEFCW to build the work of LIFT, part of which enabled us to establish the milk bank hub. We are looking forward to working with the HMF and the health board to enable more families to receive and donate human milk.”
