Ending homelessness

  My colleague Dean is telling me about his day; his harrowing day. Most of it has been spent at the hospital supporting Samantha.  Samantha is 31 and she has been addicted to heroin since the age of 15. Her weakened immune system has led to the onset of septicaemia. Dean found her in her usual rough sleeping spot lying in he own faeces and called an ambulance.  Samantha has lived the life of a homeless drug addict for the last decade. All her friends are from the street. Today she was visited in hospital by her boyfriend who is also a heroin user. He is found by her bed with a syringe, surreptitiously trying to inject her. There is uproar. Nurses and security are called and he is bundled out of the ward. Dean arrives at the height of the commotion and succeeds in calming Samantha, preventing her, dressed in a hospital gown, following her boyfriend out of the building and back to sleeping rough. The usually imperturbable Dean is dejected. ‘She has lost the w...

As a callow young Chief Executive I received some interesting guidance from members of the Worshipful Company of Chief Executives of Homelessness Charities. (No, it doesn’t exist, but perhaps it should). One piece of sage advice sticks in my mind in particular. Thames Reach had placed an advertisement in the Big Issue magazine one Christmas to try and attract donations. The image of a homeless man looking suitably uplifted by our assistance secured a single £15 return from an elderly lady in East Dulwich. A grizzled Chief Executive veteran offered this counsel: ‘Put a dog in the picture’. He went on to explain in his characteristically forthright way that ‘most people don’t like the homeless. They reckon they’ve brought it all on themselves. But they love animals’. At the time I felt vaguely affronted on behalf of the Great British Public. Even though we did have space in some of our hostels for the person and their pet and could therefore justifiably include a cute pooch in the pict...

Most days we are rung at Thames Reach by somebody who wants to help the homeless; it is really rather gratifying. Media bods come with propositions intended to shed fresh light on ‘The Plight of the Homeless’. The Big Idea often involves them sleeping rough on the street to give a ‘down and dirty’ account of what it is like to be a rough sleeper. Quite often they are genuinely unaware that a proposal of this type is put to us at least once a month. Sometimes the call is from a designer with a new invention to pilot, such as a collapsible tent for rough sleepers or a particularly warm body bag to keep them snug during those winter nights. As the vast majority of rough sleepers aspire to a bricks and mortar solution rather than a life under canvas or in a sleeping bag, we tend to give them short shrift. Some approaches are from, to be frank, cranks. On this particular morning I seem to have been reached by a Premier League crank. The conversation went as follows: ‘Mr Swain, my na...