St Mungo's Buckets
It was nice to see one of my ideas come to fruition at work this week. One of the many ways in which we measure the success of our service is how much our guys participate in the community. There is always an element of this in our work. Many of our guys attend colleges, have voluntary jobs, shop locally, use public services etc. One of the ways I thought we could directly improve on this is for our guys to give something back to the community by the way of charity work.
At the time that I was having this brainwave we were experiencing a bit of a cold snap with the weather and my thoughts were very much with the homeless at the time. I put the two ideas together and also remembered that we have a homeless person's hospital (run by the charity, 'St Mungo's') so we can even kind of adopt/twin the hostel with our house to promote the building of particular relationships as well as the wider charitable sentiments.
I contacted the charity and put a plan into action. They were organising bucket collections at major London train stations in the run up to Xmas so I registered our names for that. We also plan to introduce ourselves to the hostel by taking around some baked goods in the new year. We are also going to do our own fundraising activities like sponsored walks and coffee mornings.
The bucket collection we did at King's cross this week. Four of our service users (with myself and another member of staff supporting) collected nearly £200 in around 40 minutes at the station. This was a pretty good haul by anyone's standards. The charity workers were pretty chuffed with what we did and the guys themselves got a lot out of it and had a good time while they did. These are people who spend most of their lives having people do things for them so it was nice to see them on the other end of that relationship for a change. All that and we did something useful for the homeless too! Everyone's a winner.
At the time that I was having this brainwave we were experiencing a bit of a cold snap with the weather and my thoughts were very much with the homeless at the time. I put the two ideas together and also remembered that we have a homeless person's hospital (run by the charity, 'St Mungo's') so we can even kind of adopt/twin the hostel with our house to promote the building of particular relationships as well as the wider charitable sentiments.
I contacted the charity and put a plan into action. They were organising bucket collections at major London train stations in the run up to Xmas so I registered our names for that. We also plan to introduce ourselves to the hostel by taking around some baked goods in the new year. We are also going to do our own fundraising activities like sponsored walks and coffee mornings.
The bucket collection we did at King's cross this week. Four of our service users (with myself and another member of staff supporting) collected nearly £200 in around 40 minutes at the station. This was a pretty good haul by anyone's standards. The charity workers were pretty chuffed with what we did and the guys themselves got a lot out of it and had a good time while they did. These are people who spend most of their lives having people do things for them so it was nice to see them on the other end of that relationship for a change. All that and we did something useful for the homeless too! Everyone's a winner.