On the Street Project
Becoming a rough sleeper has many causes, including mental health and/or relationship breakdown, financial collapse and loss of employment, eviction and others.
Going from living in low quality accommodation and struggling on low income from week to week to ending up on the street is a far too easy step. Not much has to go wrong for that too happen, especially if you have little support and no friends or family to help.
From there it’s tough to survive, let alone climb out of that situation.
This project began six years ago with our founders taking food and clothes into London on the tube. A year ago we were helping around 60 people every Thursday evening on one “trolley route”. We are now helping double that number (120) on the original route and have begun a second route helping another 40. We expect to add another evening (Monday) in 2024, provided we can raise the funds.
We see some people only once or twice and we see others every week. Homeless people are people first and homeless second. They value the food and clothing but they tell us that they really appreciate that we have time for them and that we listen.
How It Works
At a macro level, our broken housing system and rising rents and mortgages also need to be addressed to reduce practical poverty and stop the feeder mechanisms of homelessness, and more besides.
We collect donated food and clothing on a daily basis, including from supermarkets and bakeries, fire-sales and other charity shops. Every Tuesday we have a volunteer team spending 3 hours collating all that and packing the van that we were so generously donated recently, ready for Thursday evening’s trip into London.
We have another volunteer team preparing hot drinks and food for the distribution team to take on the night. We have a core team of 30 volunteers working with us, some almost every week, others once per month or so.
One key need we have at present is some free or cheap storage space in Central London to better organise our deliveries.
