Who do we help

We will help anyone who is in need.

We have found that many of the larger organisations which are both well funded and well supported tend to have a lot of form filling before help can be obtained, this isnt to say they dont do a good job, however if you have a family who have no food or an person who needs food in order to take medication and they dont have any then it is ridiculous to ask these people to fill in forms to see if the fit the criteria.
We are often asked how we decide who to help, simple answer we will help anyone who needs it, it can be something as simple as sitting down with someone over a cup of tea/coffee and just listening to them while they talk through their day, week or sometimes they talk through their whole life, they dont want a magic wand waving and everything in the garden to be rosy, all these people really want is for someone to listen.
To give someone just a little of your time can make all the difference.

It is a very sad fact that loneliness is a killer and sometimes it is recognised that older people do get lonely and that is in the process of being addressed with a dedicated phone line being set up so that people of retirement age can call someone and be able to talk.
What appears to be little understood is that anyone can be lonely, and it is for that reason that we exclude no one and try our very best to include everyone.

My friend and I were walking through our city about 3 years ago now and right in front of us a man fell over, the street was full of people yet it was left to my friend and I to pick this man up and sit him on a bench, shocking isnt it!!!!!!!!!!
Why was this man who obviously needed help ignored, walked around and left by others, quite simply because he was a homeless man, he is a human being just like you and I and he needed help, thats all my friend and I saw.
Others saw the dirty clothes, the looks we got off people haunt me to this day, they looked at us as though we were mad, why would we want to help this man, they really didnt understand and IF they had helped him then they have to face an uncomfortable truth, this man really does exsist, where if they choose to ignore him then he is invisable!!!!!!!!
This man was lovely, yes he had "issues" but what none of the people who passed him by will ever know is that his partner had died less than 24 hours before, this man was devastated and didnt know what to do or how to begin to cope.
We sat him down and while my friend talked to him I went and got him a sandwich and a hot drink, we were then joined by a couple more homeless men who also wanted to tell us their story, the one that stood out most was the man who had had his own business as a landscape gardener, own home, beautiful wife and life was perfect, his beautiful wife then got cancer and sadly she died, the man couldnt cope,  lost his business the his home and found himself on the streets where he turned to alcohol as a means of escape, an absolute tragedy.
The man who`s wife had died wasnt as engrained into the homeless world as the other 2 but there is little or no support out there for men like this, he should have recieved support way before he lost everything but didnt, the chances are that he will still be on the streets today.

People can be so judgemental re homelessness, I do hope they read my blog, if it makes one person stop and think the next time they cross over the street to avoid someone like the men we met that day then it will have been worth my writing this whole blog.

The one common thing that all of these men said they missed was human contact, you know a good old fashioned cuddle, not a lot to ask is it.
None of the men that day asked us for anything at all apart from a cuddle and a conversation which we glady gave, we stayed with them for about 2 hours.