Homeless at Christmas

One of last Christmas’s suggestions was to find out about the homeless locally. This led to my contact with the Wycombe Winter Night Shelter and a supporting them through the period of their operations – January to March – last year. We are supporting them as one of the Christmas charities in Church and I’ll be suggesting my IT Friends donate to them again in the first three months next year. I just hope I’ll have more time to sort out PC problems than I have had this quarter.

My first reaction to homeless locally was “ Homeless? Around here? Surely not” but the WWNS experience soon put me right. Their success is nothing short of spectacular: last winter, they had 48 guests during the three months, including 9 women. By the end of March, 40 of these had moved on to some form of accommodation – hostels, family, shared housing etc. Unfortunately 4 were still on the streets. Before I saw the report, I had thought that getting 10% off the streets would have been a success but over 80% is spectacular.

I’ll try to blog more about the WWNS later – but you can see something of their operations on their web site. Meanwhile, it’s a thought that while we are trying to find time for Christmas, there are people not far away struggling with a whole different set of problems.