In January, the Gloucester City Mission opened it’s doors overnight to give the vulnerable a place to feel safe and a place to sleep. Every night since the January 5, the Mission has been supplying hot meals, sleeping bags, breakfast and showers to those in need. The opening of the shelter brought a lot of “challenges and barriers” and Dave Kinghorn spoke to Park Life about whether he thinks the hard work paid off.
SWEP, the Severe Weather Emergency Protocol is an emergency procedure running throughout the U.K which provides somewhere for the homeless to be housed inside if the night-time weather gets cold enough.
Dave mentioned that he was able to open up this centre, but there was a drive for more. He stated “for me the drive this year has been about the need for there to be more than that provision.” He continued to explain that while the protocol helps out, the City Mission can provide more.
With the heavy snowfall last week, Dave and his team decided to run the building for 23 hours a day from March 1 to March 4. The centre was closed for half an hour at a time, to switch from day to night shifts and hoover the floor. Dave said that this closure is necessary as “people have been walking over the floor all day and then the homeless in the evening may not particularly want to sleep on that floor”.
The average turnout for each night was 12 to 13 people a night, helping out a total of 98 people over the course of the shelter’s run-time and “this was more than I expected to receive”.
Dave said: “the more people we put in, the more potential there is for issues to arise because it gets more cramped.”
Gloucester City Mission is all about “building relationships with people” and Dave feels that the shelter, along with the other services which has provided for almost 15 years, creates a personal and caring attitude with everything that the mission does. GCM wants people to have trust in them and feel safe.
Plans for the shelter to open up again next winter are already in place, and instead of January, Gloucester City Mission will open its doors to the homeless on December 1. While this is great news, it will make work much harder for Dave and the team. Although the service they provide is planned to be run the same, there will be “lots of new challenges and lots of new questions … every day is different her so I imagine that everything we have learned this year probably wont happen next year”.
Dave is expecting there to be a very large turnout around the end of the year, so the shelter will also be open for Christmas 2018.
GCM is running a “Survive the Night” charity event to help raise money for the centre. The challenge consists of spending one night staying rough outside Gloucester Cathedral. The event takes place on may 12.
