We caught up with this year’s Winter Shelter managers to hear how thing’s are going at the shelter so far….

‘This year the winter shelter is running for 26 weeks, from October through to April. We work at six church halls, between four and five weeks at each church hall. We take between 20 and 24 capacity each night depending on the hall.

Referrals

Most the referrals to Emmanuel House come through our street outreach team; they’ll see them at night then ask them to come to us. We don’t have a local connection rule, so we will take people with no local connections or access to public funds such as Europeans and refugees.

Anyone who comes into Emmanuel house has a full referral done. They then have a risk assessment, and because of how we work, we can only take people from low to medium risk. When people are accepted to the shelter, then they are given a time limited stay to start with. This is normally seven days, and a full support plan is carried out. That may be that they need to register with a GP, they may need to go and see a drug or alcohol agency or engage with mental health facilities.

What happens on a night?

At 8pm volunteers will go and set up, put tables and chairs out, put air beds and bedding packs out, sort toiletries, set up the kitchen and then the guests come in from 9pm. Each guest is signed in (for fire safety) and asked to make their beds up, because some like to come in and go straight to sleep.

Then what’s on offer is basic food, paninis, etc, anything that’s donated such as beans on toast, coffee, tea… hot chocolate goes down well!  People sit and talk, or some of the staff may be working with them in the evening. We take board games, we’ve had an appeal out for people to donate board games, and we still need more. They like to sit and…do what we would do at home, basically. It’s a bit of normality in a life that is far from, at that times. We do ask for lights out between 11 and 11:30pm but that does depend on the guests we’ve got in.  Sometimes everyone is asleep by half 10 so we turn the lights out. As long as everyone is happy there’s no problem.

Hopefully they’ll get a good sleep, and then in the morning they’re woken at 7am for basic breakfast, cereal toast etc. We ask that they are out by 7:45am and we do also ask that they leave the area. Some of the church halls are near schools or in residential areas and we have to be conscious of other people in that area. We want to be welcome and want to keep staying there so we have to set this rule. And then the staff and volunteers pack away for the church hall to be used for the next day.

Opening earlier this year

This year we did wonder that because we opened 6 weeks earlier than normal, we won’t be very busy. The first night we started off with three but it’s still worthwhile because that’s three people not out on the street and three people working with us when they weren’t working with anybody. The numbers have gradually gone up and on Tuesday this week we had 18 in a venue that has a capacity of 20 so that has just proved that opening early was the right thing to do. There is a huge need out there.

I’ve been in this line of work for 9 years and seen things grow. This project is so worthwhile. We had 111 guests last year, we housed 56 and got 9 reconnected back from where they came, I mean we don’t just send people back we make sure there’s something there for them. Last year we had more women use the service than ever before and out of the 56 individuals we housed, I’ve been able to contact 40, and 33 are still maintaining their tenancy which I’m extremely pleased about.”