A southeast London charity is looking to open a permanent homeless shelter people in the local area.
Since 2014, Greenwich Winter Night Shelter (GWNS) has given rough-sleepers a warm place during the coldest season of the year. The charity, set up by seven local churches to address the growing problem of homelessness in Greenwich, now wants to offer year-round help.
The charity says it will open a new permanent shelter in Eltham, in a building leased by the council.
GWNS development manager Katy Ridsdill-Smith has said the new building can accommodate nine people: “We’ve got two wings in the building. We’ve got six people in one, which will be six men in single-room accommodation, and down the other end of the building is the women’s wing, and we’ve got three rooms down there because we tend to have fewer women than men.”
She said that post-Covid, the shelter could accommodate more people, “but because of transmission at the moment and ventilation stuff we’re not able to, it has to be single-room.”
The new shelter has cost surprisingly little in terms of redecorating, renovations and installations. A dozen volunteers painted and decorated it. Most of the building work, electrical work and shower installations were done for free by businesses that had pledged to acts of corporate social responsibility. The architectural plans for renovation were also pro bono. The council replaced the boiler in the building and in November, some councillors participated in a “sleepout” fundraiser. The event raised £5,000 for GWNS and Woolwich Service User Project, a Woolwich grassroots charity.
Until now, the charity operated on a rotating model with participating churches offering up their space to rough sleepers once a week. This meant that every night, the sleeper had to travel to another church to spend the night. The permanent shelter will let sleepers leave their belongings and go about their day.
The charity said it is also planning to relaunch a day centre, which will serve as as a drop-in for those who need specialist support and advice. Case workers at the day centre will offer one-on-one help to get people out of homelessness, focusing on issues related to mental and physical health, welfare, immigration, drug and alcohol addiction and other risk factors.
Unlike most organisations, the pandemic didn’t adversely affect the charity – in fact, it helped!
“We wouldn’t be there without Covid.”
Greenwich Winter Night Shelter development manager Katy Ridsdill-Smith
The lockdown enabled GWNS to generate funding and support to make bigger plans even though the initial lockdown period required them to halt their services because the government ensured the homeless had shelter through the Everyone In scheme. Nearly 40,000 people were moved into emergency accommodation where they could isolate when the first lockdown was underway, under the Everyone In scheme.
According to Crisis, one in four of the vulnerable people covered by the Everyone In scheme remain at risk of being trapped in the cycle of homelessness with the government unable to fulfil its goal of ending rough sleeping by May 2024. That is where charities such as GWNS and its planned permanent shelter comes in, activists say.
Ms Ridsdill-Smith believes that the UK government could be doing more to tackle homelessness: “I think it’s really important that the government take a holistic stance to look at what are the factors that lead to somebody becoming homeless, and what we are putting in place to support people so that we are actually preventing homelessness rather than dealing with homelessness as it arises.”
For the time being, GWNS has the funds to cover salaries and additional costs. But it now wants to find a more sustainable way of raising money in order to work on long-term plans to help the homeless.
