IN a response to the Syrian refugee crisis, a group of local mothers have volunteered to collect donations to ship to desperate families in Kos, Lesbos and other Greek islands.

Rhiannon, from Tavistock Enterprise Hub, was shocked into action after seeing an image of a young Syrian girl, of similar age to her own daughter, waiting for help in the sea.

Feeling a desire to help, she began to search for a local donation collecting service in the area on Facebook but found that the majority of campaigns were looking for men’s clothing and accessories.

As a single mother, Rhiannon said she didn’t own a lot of men’s items so contacted her friends to develop a Facebook- based donation collection, which would accept clothing and accessories for men, women and children.

The Facebook page received an abundance of offers to collect, check and distribute the donations and a high number of people pledging old clothes.

Rhiannon also managed to secure the use of a room, on the ground floor of the Tavistock Enterprise Hub, to store the donations.

The Facebook page, Dartmoor — Refugee Solidarity for Kos and Islands, received more than 100 likes over the weekend, after being established on Friday.

She added: ‘A friend of mine from Tavistock’s Play Planet has agreed to help, so too has a teacher from Mount Kelly who is keen to harness the volunteering capabilities of her students and a woman from Marjon University. We are all local mums, the whole team is made up of women.

‘We thought, how do we as mothers, help mothers running away from horrors that we will hopefully never face.’

Rhiannon quickly found that the local support would not be an issue but the cost effective logistics in shipping the donations overseas would put a pause on the campaign.

Rhiannon said: ‘Kos has not yet set up a way to receive shipping containers full of donations but that is the quantity of stuff they need.’

After a short halt on the donation collecting, she was contacted by a haulage company which was willing to help.

‘I have been in contact with a woman called Kerry from Kos Kindness and she is overwhelmed with all of the donations,’ said Rhiannon. ‘We are looking for warm and wet weather gear, for women, children and men, shoes, toiletries, tents and sleeping bags.’

Other local organisations include a group in Plymouth that is collecting for Syria, a group in Buckfastleigh that has been collecting for Syria for a year and groups in Exeter and Bristol that have been collecting for Calais.

She added: ‘It seems like the refugees are being told: “well done, you’ve got to dry land but you have to keep moving.”

‘We are interested to see how many refugees David Cameron will allow into the UK. If we have families coming to Tavistock we can collect things to give them when they arrive.’

It has since been reported that the UK will accept up to 20,000 refugees from Syria in the next five years, with more than 4,000 Syrians having been granted asylum in the UK since the beginning of the crisis in 2011.

‘It is simply about being members of the human race, if the Government got away with fracking all the water on Dartmoor and we had no where to go I’d hope people would help us.

‘People are swayed by incorrect messaging, not all refugees want to come to the UK. If we ended up with 20 families in Tavistock, its likely that we would be scoring people from doctors to police officers.

‘The people who have the get up and go to make the journey aren’t going to sit here and do nothing.’

Rhiannon said that if the group was unable to discover a sustainable way of getting the donations to Kos, Lesbos or other Greek islands, they would look into fundraising to provide people with money on land to buy food, clothes and accessories, a method which Rhiannon said might also benefit the Greek economy.

She added: ‘We’ve all been touched by the enthusiasm and generosity of people donating physical items. People feel closer to helping the situation by donating personal items from their children or husbands.’

Dartmoor — Refugee Solidarity for Kos and Islands will be collecting tomorrow (Friday) at the Tavistock Enterprise Hub and again on Saturday if there is any load capacity left.

Members of the Congregation of St Eustachius’ Church are also holding a cream tea and craft exhibition on Friday, September 18, at 2.30pm in the parish rooms in aid of the Syrian refugees.