Eddie* was working as a chef in a London hotel and living in East Ham when he developed a skin condition that led to him losing his job. Soon after, he was forced out of his home.
Born in Guinea-Bissau, west Africa, Eddie moved out of the family home there when he was 14, after his mother died. In 2012, aged 31, he decided to use his EU citizenship (his father is Portuguese) to move to London and make a fresh start, working first as a cleaner, then a kitchen porter before landing the chef role.
After being forced into homelessness, he slept on a friend’s floor for a while and then on the streets. It was when a kindly passerby bought him some food and gave him Crisis’s number that things changed for Eddie.
Alex, a Crisis case worker, found Eddie a place in a Crisis at Christmas hotel. (During the 2020 pandemic, Crisis stopped housing people who were sleeping rough in dormitories over Christmas, and began using hotels – a scheme that has continued.) Here, he had a warm room, regular meals and access to a hot shower. “Everything was just perfect,” he says. Alex helped Eddie access universal credit, obtain a travel card to visit a doctor and, finally, find a place to live, sourcing a bed, wardrobe and kitchen equipment. The experience has been transformative. “If it wasn’t for Crisis, I might have died,” says Eddie.
There can be a lack of understanding about what pushes people into homelessness, but it’s a lack of support services to help people cope with difficult circumstances that often gets people to this stage. Homelessness isn’t confined to rough sleeping, either – while that’s certainly the case for some of the people Crisis helps, others may be sofa-surfing or living in temporary accommodation.
Crisis provides its services through 11 regional Skylight centres, used by nearly 9,000 people in 2021. The first point of contact for a new member – people who use its services – is an engagement and assessment worker, someone who can help them develop a tailored plan for addressing their needs when it comes to housing, skills and employment. They are then assigned a personal case worker, known as a coach.
The Skylight centres are warm, welcoming places that offer not only help and advice, but facilities and classes that enable people to mingle. Matt Cruz, who now works in Crisis’s community and events fundraising team, but came to the organisation as a service user, says he used to volunteer in the library. “It’s a space where members can congregate, have lunch and speak to each other,” he says. “Just having that sense of community helps a lot. People are welcome to stay there and read while they are waiting for their coach. They go there and they make friends.”
Crisis’s priority is always to find its members somewhere to live, offering them help with searching for rental accommodation and accessing benefits. Once someone has a safe home, the coach helps them with other needs. This can include taking classes at a Skylight centre to learn work-related skills, such as English, maths and IT, or physical skills focusing on wellbeing, such as yoga or kickboxing. Cruz says such classes are part of “rebuilding a person’s confidence”, creating a “feeling of self-worth, of getting the skills they need to get back into employment”. Encouraged by his coach to take classes, he found they gave him a routine and structure.
Coaches also help with writing job applications, creating a CV and finding work experience. Training and employment coaching are tailored towards the needs of each individual, says Serrena Tanna, Crisis impact and involvement manager. “Our guiding principle is that our service users should be able to have autonomy and the ability to make their own decisions.”
The team she heads provides opportunities to acquire training or employment experience in Crisis businesses or enterprises. Volunteering in one of Crisis’s 11 London-based shops, as Cruz did, can equip service users with retail-specific skills, such as processing stock or visual merchandising, as well as the transferable skills of customer service and team work. Crisis also provides opportunities with business partners – the fashion brand Hush, for example, offers a shadowing day for students on Crisis’s retail training programme, while Volcano Coffee Works offers free places for Crisis’s members on its barista training programmes.
Extra support is available through the Changing Lives programme, which offers a grant of up to £5,000 to help people receive training, or set up their own business. It can turn people’s lives around – one Crisis member, Laura*, went from being homeless and alcohol-dependent to working as a freelance illustrator, thanks to a grant that helped her to buy a laptop and art materials.
Crisis makes a difference because it treats people experiencing homelessness like anyone else – as an individual, with dignity and respect. As Cruz, whose life changed as a result of the charity’s help, says, Crisis’s staff are “just such lovely people – they have the most amount of patience in the world. They really care, their warmth is so evident, and it has an effect on the person receiving the help.”
*Names have been changed
If you’re interested in ending homelessness by volunteering, campaigning, fundraising or making a donation to Crisis, and want to find out more, visit crisis.org.uk
