How do we help?

howdowehelpMeeting point: A core group of trained volunteers meet every night in Queen’s Gardens in central Croydon to assist homeless people. We are often the first-line agency in identifying and offering help to the newly homeless. We are also available every day through this meeting point for dealing with crises and new challenges in the lives of our clients.

We reckon to make contact some with people in need some 29,000 times a year. Of course, this is not 29,000 people, we may see the same person almost every night, some people only once. We see some 1000 different people over the year, in different stages of need.

The following is a graph showing how the figures for clients have increased since 1988, using Sunday (our busiest night) as a guide.

Re-settlement: We work with people through various stages of homelessness, encouraging and assisting in their resettlement back into the community, providing them with furniture and household items and organising specialists to do such things as plumbing work. We used to resettle some 50 former homeless people a year but the programme has been affected by the recession which has stopped our major funding.  The housing crisis has also reduced the number of our clients who are getting rehoused.

We help with furniture for people in new accommodation and former clients who have furniture needs.  We work with the services of a furniture recycling charity.  We do not store or deliver furniture ourselves.  If you have furniture to donate, please do so via:

Emmaus 0208 761 4276

Vocational: We continue to help our clients (those formerly homeless) through education and retraining for remunerative work to help them enter the community as productive, independent individuals. We typically help some 50 individuals a year with items such s working clothes, particularly boots, and textbooks.

Click here to see photos of Nightwatch in action.

Click here to see photos of fundraising events.