C4WS Shelter December 2020 to March 2021
The shelter closed on Maundy Thursday; we had a small celebration to thank some of the key players, but it was a slightly melancholy affair as the C4WS staff were exhausted and concerned about the fate of the five remaining guests, and the helpful and friendly hotel staff were sad as their jobs came to an end. The hotel will undergo a (much needed) thorough renovation.
Nevertheless, it had been a comfortable and mostly warm (icy dining room apart) home for the guests. In many ways much more comfortable that the traditional revolving shelter, as they did not need to find a new church each night of the week, did not have to carry their belongings around all day and slept in beds in their own rooms, which were much cosier, despite our, and other church’s efforts, than mattresses on the floor. The C4WS staff could see them for welfare meetings on site and the office in Lancing St was only 100 yards up the road.
So, the static shelter had many advantages, but it was harder to create a sense of community, both among the volunteers and the guests themselves who tended to spend the time in their rooms (although they were free to come and go during the day). The C4WS staff tried hard, and with some success; there were yoga classes, a gardening club (mostly in pots), bingo, film shows and more, but nothing creates a community like sitting down to eat together with a team of volunteers each night. A few teams did cook (or tried to, on the practically non-existent facilities) and the usual plastic packed dinners were surprisingly good but eating together was not possible.
Overall, the static arrangement was better for the guests; the casualties were the churches, for which there was inevitably little of the sense of common purpose involving such a wider section of the congregation (and more) which so characterised our efforts at HPS, and the same was true elsewhere. That was unfortunate, and it’s easy to forget that the shelter is run for the guests, not the volunteers! I am, however, very grateful to the small stalwart group of people who were able to volunteer and fill up our rota and I quite understand why so many felt they could not help while Covid raged.
We lost a month and half through disappointments in finding a hotel/hostel to house the shelter but were able to welcome 20 guests (previously only 16) and the total number was 54 for the season (usually more like 80) We were much less strict with the move on after 28 days rule as it was hard to find stable accommodation for many, and indeed we had not done so for 5 guests at the end of the season. These guests had no recourse to public funds. A recent decision in Brighton confirmed the local authority’s obligation to accommodate such people. Camden has refused to do so and with the help of Camden Law Centre (acting pro bono) we are seeking judicial review of its decision. Meanwhile, we have a grant to keep the guests in back-packer hostels, but that is an unsatisfactory long-term solution.
Refreshed by their post shelter break, the staff are now busy with the judicial review, writing reports and deciding what to do for the next season’s shelter. A static shelter again seems inevitable, and we hope to have identified a suitable location when Nikki Barnett our director returns from maternity leave in June.
Thank you to everyone who helped in any way with shelter this season; I wish more of you could have been involved and a major item on our agenda is to see how that might be achieved next season.