Last week we hosted a small event in honour of World Homeless Day, which included extra options for breakfast, such as pastries and fruit, Jen cooking up the guests favourite cuisine - Mexican, and a few announcements about our current activities and new activities on the way. Although we wanted to make the day special for our guests, we understand that homelessness is an issue all year round, therefore we continuously strive to improve our services.
In the lead up to World Homeless Day we had our Autumn Quarterly Survey go out, available for guests to complete anonymously, with help reading and filling out the form provided by case workers. The survey helps us to understand the demographic of our guests, what their current accommodation status is, what issues they are currently experiencing or struggling with, and what services or activities they access here at The Bridge. When going through every type of help or service offered, we also ask what guests like about it, and what they think we could improve upon.
The majority of our guests are single, white British men, between the ages of 46 - 55, who have lived in Leicester for less than one year. The results for accommodation status show that most guests are either street homeless, or have been housed for a very short period of time, highlighting the struggles that some have with maintaining a tenancy. When asked what issues guests were currently facing, or have experienced in the past, the most common answer was mental health issues, at 85%. Financial issues and substance abuse were the second and third most common, reporting at 64% and 57%, respectively.
Most of our guests are accessing help from one of our case workers, with the most common form of support being assistance accessing housing accommodations. This in itself can be a very long and complex issue to solve. The first step a caseworker would take is making contact with the council, which is done over the phone and often takes up to two hours just to get through. Along with the time spent sitting with a guest and getting all the information, this stage could take up to three to four hours. Once this is done we can provide advice with what housing options are available, and begin to make referrals for temporary accommodation, start to look for permanent accommodation, and help guests with the applications. When applying to any permanent accommodation, case workers will help with applications to VRF, which financially support someone with up to £500 towards rent advances or deposits; this application can take up to an hour. Once a case worker has found somewhere for a guest and acquired the funding, they will then offer support with referrals for furniture, contacting utilities, setting up accounts, and referring the guest to other forms of support. This is all for finding permanent accommodation for a guest, find temporary accommodation, however, may have to be the first step to get a person off of the streets, before then starting the process to look for permanent accommodation.
There is no average timescale for helping someone find accommodation, as it can be very different with each person depending on their situation, their connection to Leiecster, and what they’re willing to accept. When finding permanent accommodation, it would be rare for someone to be housed within a month. Despite the long process, and the fact that support with housing is the most used support accessed with our case workers, our guests could not find anything they wanted to improve.
When it came to collecting feedback and insights on improvements from our guests, the most common suggestion was more activities to be offered, and for The Bridge to be open longer hours and more days of the week. Whilst we currently are unable to have longer hours due to funding, we were happy to announce our newest activities to be offered during our World Homeless Day Event. Thanks to some of our staff with various athletic experience we have been able to plan offering boxing sessions to our guests, and to start a football team. Our current recreational, and wellbeing activities all involve sitting at tables for hours at a time, whether that’s our art workshops, our cooking classes, or our music sessions. But not everyone can manage to sit still for that long, in particular those with conditions like ADHD, especially when that’s already necessary when working with a case worker. By offering physical activities we are able to help our guests become more active, build social and teamwork skills, and experience the benefits to mental health that come with exercise.
We’re pleased that our guests enjoyed the extras offered last week during World Homeless Day, and we’re looking forward to discussing all the feedback received from the survey at our next meeting so we can continue to work on improving our services and offering more. When it comes to activities, we’re about to have a lot more on, thanks to our Christmas celebrations. Keep an eye out for a new fundraiser to help us make Christmas at The Bridge the best it can be.
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