We are setting up a Hub in St Helens for the homeless that will provide education to schools, groups and clubs in the form of two workshops per week. In the workshops, they will cook a healthy meal for the night café, learn about stigmas and barriers people face when homeless, also Arts, looking at positive wellbeing.
We plan one day per week, every Monday (10am -2pm) for four/five Agencies to attend to give advice, assistance to Service Users, those threatened with homelessness and the vulnerable in the community.
Plans are in place to carry out group work, these include Voice on the Street, a new initiative. This is an advocacy group giving service users a safe place where they feel enabled to express the issues they face and the output from this will be fed back to our local Council (St Helens) and Councillors so that change can be made.
We will deliver CBT and PC based counselling, anger management and confidence and assertiveness courses.
We will deliver, two afternoons per week, as well as a drop-in centre, life skills e.g. cooking, budgeting etc.
Every Saturday we will run a Family Day, this will be for service users who have children but are separated from them due to accommodation issues. By providing a safe, warm place where they can have fun we can help them to rebuild their relationships with their children, plus get a free, healthy, cooked meal. The impact of having this service will help both service users and their children overcome and/or prevent issues that can be associated when relationships breakdown example attachment disorder, social anxiety, depression, other potential mental health issues, feelings of abandonment. This will help build self-esteem, confidence and most importantly, enable a positive healthy relationship and be a family again.
There will be additional services provided on a weekly basis such as. dentistry, hairdressing, housing advice, sexual health etc.
The Hub will open four nights per week as a Night Café, based on our experience from our earlier Night Café & Outreach we would expect this to be attended by an average of fifty plus service users each time. The people who access our service are from local hostels, people who sleep rough, sofa surfing, vulnerable and at risk of losing their home, also those who have recently been re-housed and still in need of support. All the attendees come for many different reasons, e.g. somewhere they can get a hot cooked meal in a safe warm environment, for one to one support, to socialise with friends etc.
The Hub will enable us to have a full-time presence in the town, as opposed to our Outreach and Night Café and will enable us to co-ordinate and target our services more effectively. Our objective is to provide a complete end to end service for those who are homeless, threatened with homeless and vulnerable. It will also enable us to develop our relationship with our fellow partners, St Helens Council, Merseyside Police, 5 Borough Partnership, housing, Drug and Misuse service(CGL) and local Councillors
We engage with all elements of the community to raise awareness about the issues associated with homelessness, the fact that the homeless does not just consist of rough sleepers etc.
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