Our Work

 

Outreach Projects:

Bi-weekly, in Birmingham City Centre and surrounding areas, our Community Outreach volunteers will come together in our office to put together our survival kits. These kits are filled with essential items such as toiletries, sanitary products, snacks, water bottles and more. The contents of our survival kits change with the season - from gloves and hats in the Winter, to sun-cream in the Summer. These kits are designed for individuals rough sleeping, as well as those in emergency accommodation that may not have access to funds to be able to purchase these items independently. 

We often include various other items that we feel would be appreciated in these kits based on feedback we receive from surveys that we conduct with the recipients of our survival kits. For example, to mark World Book Day, we included books in waterproof bags to allow rough sleepers to access serenity from reading.

Our survival kits are donated by our community and to mark these donations, we include a card in each survival kit which highlights who the kit had been donated by, as well as which of our volunteers packed the bag. Each card will also include a unique, supportive message to demonstrate our solidarity. On the reverse side of the card we have provided signposting information to local organisations, as well the addresses of the organisations. We also provide National Express West Midlands Daysaver tickets so individuals can attend these provisions without the concern of financial insecurity.

Once the kits have been created, our Community Outreach volunteers will then attend a safety briefing, before heading out to distribute the kits, focusing on hotspots we have identified through our ongoing research, experience and feedback. 

As well as distributing survival kits, we spend a lot of time during our outreach projects speaking with rough sleepers, finding out more about their circumstances, gaining insight and feedback regarding what support they require and gaps in provisions in our city so we can understand how to build our services.

Ongoing Mentoring

During our outreach projects, we often see the same individuals on multiple outreach projects and we wanted to do something to break that cycle, so we used our feedback surveys that we conduct on our outreach projects to understand what a mentoring programme would need to look like to be suitable. 

In 2024, we received funding from The National Lottery Community Fund to launch a pilot of our mentoring programme. This allowed us to form a pilot strategy for a mentoring programme, allowing us to provide ongoing support to rough sleepers in the form of assistance in securing accommodation, applying for identification documents and applying for bank accounts and welfare benefits. During this pilot we were able to work with 4 individuals, providing varying levels of support. 

After a successful pilot, 2026 sees us launch our brand new mentoring programme. We have introduced a new team of volunteers, dedicated to providing this ongoing support as well as a partnership manager to support us in building our network of local organisations who can collaborate with us to provide this holistic approach.

Our mentoring programme will allow us to embed individuals back into society by supporting them with sourcing accommodation, gaining identification documents, applications for welfare benefits and bank accounts, as well as building their skills for employability and independent living.