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BIG TURNOUT AT CHRISTMAS DAY LUNCH

Once again the Central Methodist Hall was full to capacity as nearly 200 homeless and vulnerable people from all over Coventry and Warwickshire benefited from a free Christmas Day lunch. Over 50 volunteers gave up a large part of their Christmas Day to prepare the Hall, serve lunch and mix with our guests under the watchful eye of organiser Ayesha Rees.

As always there is not enough space to list everyone who contributed to another successful event, but special mention should be made of Paul Wood and his colleagues from the Central Methodist Hall for their continued commitment to what has become a Coventry institution.

We would also like to thank Sainsbury’s for their contribution to the presents, a group from the West Midlands Police who donated clothing, bedding and chocolates, the many local traders and individuals who donated money and food and, finally, the volunteers that gave their time to make this such a special day.

Rob Windsor Sept 1964 - Jan 2012

It is with great sadness that on Saturday 14^th January 2012 one of our most dedicated and well liked members of staff, Rob Windsor passed away.

Rob worked for the organisation on several occasions starting as a young volunteer in 1984. His latest and longest period with the organisation started in 1997 and his most recent role was that of a Mental Health Floating Support Worker.

His dedication to both the organisation and the people with whom he worked was to be admired.

One often hears a story of people who are universally liked and respected by all their colleagues, in Rob’s case this was genuinely true. He will be sadly missed as a colleague, a friend and a fine human being.

Cyrenians Service Review 2011

Coventry Cyrenians have produced a comprehensive Service Review in response to a worrying combination of rapidly increasing demand for our services and a squeeze on our sources of funding. We believe that we have to take our message and our achievements to as wide an audience as possible if we are to develop our fundraising activities. The Service Review will be circulated to the business community through the local Chamber of Commerce, every church and school in Coventry and Warwickshire, and the general public through local media and public buildings. We urge you to read this Review and seriously consider supporting a local charity that really can make a difference.

Coventry Cyrenians Service Review 2011

Christmas Day Lunch for Homeless and Vulnerable People

The Christmas Day Lunch has become an institution in the city and typically attracts well over 200 homeless and vulnerable people from the Coventry and Warwickshire area. This year we expect the Central Methodist Hall in Coventry city centre to play host to over 300 people as the economic crisis which first emerged in 2008 starts to have its long awaited impact on homelessness figures.

Coventry Cyrenians would like to take this opportunity to thank the churches, schools, local traders and private individuals who have pledged their support to the event in the form of donations of cash, food, gifts and their time. Over 50 volunteers have signed up to help on Christmas Day and no words can adequately express our gratitude for their continued support.

Images from the day will be posted on this site and a full list of donors will be included.

Cookwell Eatwell

Coventry Cyrenians have recently been awarded a grant from Voluntary Action Coventry to run a project designed to promote healthy eating, cooking for one and cooking on a budget to many of our service users.

Cookery clubs will be established at four of our accommodation projects. Some of our clients will be trained as Food Champions with a view to cooking at their own hostels and encouraging their fellow residents to consider the benefits of healthy living and working to a budget. We believe that this communal approach to cooking and eating will also help to foster a greater spirit of friendship and peer support at our residential properties.

The funding will contribute to the purchase of kitchen equipment, ingredients and training. The success of the project will be judged by the number of Food Champions we train, the attendance at weekly cookery clubs and the general response to the idea of clients cooking for clients.

Coventry Foodbank

Foodbanks are the brainchild of the Trussell Trust and there are now about 100 in the UK. The Coventry foodbank is a partnership between six churches in the Coventry area.

The idea is that three days of emergency food can be made available to people in crisis. Vouchers are issued to participating agencies and they are given out to clients considered to be in genuine need. The vouchers are then exchanged for non perishable food, all of which is nutritionally balanced. The food is donated by the general public and sorted by volunteers.

The requirement for clients to make a direct approach to the agency for vouchers offers the opportunity for meaningful engagement and a realistic assessment of longer term issues. Vouchers will not be issued to people not considered to be in genuine need, thus creating a more targeted and relevant service.

Coventry Cyrenians Newsletter July 2011

Coventry Cyrenians July Newsletter 2011

Pavement June 2011 - New multiple needs service

New Multiple Needs Service gives Cyrenians a new lease of life

In the March edition of the Pavement we brought you the sad, but as it turns out, premature news that the Coventry Cyrenians charity was being forced to severely restrict the vital services it offers users following funding cutbacks. Happily, we can now report that it has been agreed by the Cyrenians and Coventry Primary Care Trust that a more focused and targeted project – a Multiple Needs Service - should fill the void and a further year’s funding has been secured specifically for this purpose.

“The Multiple Needs Service is aimed at clients who have no fixed abode, are in poor or inadequate housing or at risk of losing their accommodation,” explains Project Leader, Lloyd Woolcock. “It is our experience is that clients with complex needs require an integrated approach.”

The Service also serves clients struggling with two or more of the following issues: Mental Health, Substance Misuse, Personality Disorder, Offending Behaviour, Learning Difficulties, Physical Health Problems, Challenging Behaviour or vulnerability due to Age.

Continues Lloyd: “It is also far cheaper and effective for an organisation like us to help resolve a person’s range of problems, rather than let individual agencies deal with individual problems as and when they arise.

“One client of ours has been in and out of short stay hostels, has been sleeping on the street, has an issue with alcohol and is in poor health. We calculated that between January and March this year he cost around 15 thousand pounds in ambulance call outs, visits to A&E and overnight hospital stays. Working with Coventry Law Centre and Social Services we identified the most suitable care package for him and he is now in supported accommodation, his alcohol consumption has gone down and the overall social costs associated with his care have been lowered significantly.

“Another thing we have discovered since starting the Multiple Needs Service is how many of our clients who are on our Rough Sleeper Service are actually people with multiple needs. The percentage is very high and clearly shows that if you are a rough sleeper the chances are you have multiple needs.”

But undoubtedly the most difficult part of the work undertaken by Lloyd’s team is the complexity of managing multi-agency partnerships and accepting that in some cases, agencies are simply unable to understand the wider social benefits that come from dealing with a client’s issues – a difficulty that is particularly acute when the Cyrenians’ window of opportunity is often so small. “We believe that this is a problem that will be remedied when our service has been promoted across the region, which is a challenge in itself for any small charity operating as we do at a local level.”

Link to Pavement

Rough Sleepers

If you have seen someone sleeping rough, or you know someone that is sleeping rough, you can now contact us 24/7, 365 dasys a year on our dedicated email address or our dedicated freephone number. We will pick up the details you provide us and then we will target the location for early morning visits so that we may be able to make contact with the person sleeping rough at that location. Even if we don’t see the person we have specially produced contact cards that we can leave so that the person rough sleeping knows how to make contact with us and also that we know they are sleeping in that location.

The email address is: roughsleeper@coventrycyrenians.org

The freephone number is: 0800 881 5999

And please keep in mind that you do not have to leave your own details if you would prefer to remain anonymous, but if you would like feedback then please do provide us with your contact details if calling, and if you are emailing just make it clear you would like us to email you back.

Our Client Newsletter Dec10

Welcome to our Client led Newsletter. Newsletter

At any one time we can have 200+ clients on our books, spread over Coventry and Warwickshire, between their own tenancies, our own accommodation, sleeping rough and living in unsuitable accommodation.

We consider all our clients to be individuals in their own right, perhaps some share ages, gender, or geographical locations, but each has their own unique back story, their own life that they live, their own set of problems to sort out. But the one thing that unites every single client we see is the issue of homelessness.

The issue of homelessness is not something that the vast majority of people in this country will ever have to deal with. Yet for every client that we deal with it is the one unifying factor that they all share.

Our Client Newsletter is our attempt to link each and every client we have, regardless of where they may live, or what their circumstances may be. The Newsletter is a way for our clients to stay connected with those who share their experience, those that personally understand what the issue of homelessness means when living with it day to day.

Coventry Cyrenians believes that the Newsletter can be beneficial to our clients on two levels; the first enables our clients to share experiences and pass on information that is relevant to them, the second is the emotional health benefits that can be derived from expressive writing.

Although we have successfully run client newsletters before as stand alone projects, this is the first all encompassing newsletter we have produced. For a first effort it has gone down well with staff and more importantly with both our clients who have contributed and those who have read it. We already have a client that wants to be the editor for future editions, and we are working hard behind the scenes to offer our clients opportunities within the newsletter that will help enhance CVs and work preparedness.

We hope you enjoy reading this edition and all our future editions and please let us know what you think. If you represent another organisation or private company and think there may be scope for some partnership working, then please do contact us.

As the saying goes, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, and we hope the Client Newsletter will be the broadsword that our clients can wield to their advantage.

BBC COVENTRY AND WARWICKSHIRE RADIO FEATURE ROUGH SLEEPERS

The recent severe weather has raised awareness of the plight of homeless people sleeping rough. Breakfast programme presenter Marion McNamee from Coventry and Warwickshire radio accompanied Michaela Fern and Karen Bayley from our Rough Sleeper’s team on their tour of places within the Coventry Ring Road where rough sleepers are likely to be found.

Starting at 6.00 am 3rd December from Norton Hous e in temperatures of -10 degrees, the walk took in the railway station, the swimming baths, parks and high rise blocks. The objective is to encourage rough sleepers to come into Norton House and discuss the circumstances that have driven them to this way of life and to try and find them some emergency accommodation. Once this has been achieved, our workers actively seek to address issues that commonly involve drugs, alcohol and mental illness. Interviews were carried out with Karen and Simon, one of the rough sleepers, before the programme moved onto the Salvation Army to interview people who had sought refuge in the building during the coldest night of the year.

Refreshed Fashion - Dec 2010

Clothes Show Posters

The recycling collaboration involving Coventry Cyrenians, Coventry University and Coventry Trading Standards is to be featured on BBC Midlands Today. Provisionally scheduled for Thursday, 2^nd December, representatives from Trading Standards, the design students at the University and Coventry Cyrenians’ Chief Executive, Mike Fowler are interviewed ahead of the Clothes Show at the NEC next week where about 40 items will be displayed.

The event will showcase the talents of the students in turning counterfeit shirts into dresses and accessories. The charity has plans to convert part of its premises on Far Gosford Street into a retail outlet selling limited edition garments and accessories produced from student designs. The project is also seen as offering potential training and employment opportunities to some of the many homeless and vulnerable young people that are numbered amongst the clients of Coventry Cyrenians.

We would like to acknowledge the valuable input provided by staff at Incorporatewear, a pre-eminent corporate clothing supplier and a company founded by the famous designer Jeff Banks. We hope this will be the beginning of a long and fruitful working relationship.

Link to BBC C&W News feature

HOMELESS SERVICE TO TARGET MOST VULNERABLE

Norton House Day Centre for the Homeless is to change its service to ensure that those in greatest need get the best possible service.

Following a study of the people using the day centre and discussions with funders the day centre, which merged with Coventry Cyrenians three years ago, is set to deliver a more targeted service aimed at those who face the most difficulties.

Many of the people who use the centre, which is situated by the Swanswell Pool, have a range of additional needs as well as having problems with accommodation or nowhere to live at all.

“We carried out an in depth assessment of the needs of about forty of the regular people who use the service and found a wide variation in the level of needs among the group,” explained Chief Executive, Mike Fowler.

“Almost everyone who used the service had at one time been homeless. What we found though was that at one end of the scale there were people who had their own secure accommodation and used the service mainly for occasional advice and support but often as a place where they could meet with other people who they had met as a result of their homelessness,” said Mr Fowler. “Worryingly though a significant minority face major challenges in their lives which means that their ability to access or sustain accommodation is severely impaired.”

Of those people surveyed about a quarter reported being of no fixed abode or were sleeping rough in the city. Nearly two thirds of those reported having mental health problems and many also had additional challenges of alcohol or drug misuse.

Explaining the reasons for the proposed change in the service Mr Fowler said, “Having talked to the people who use the service and the Primary Care Trust who fund it, we felt that it was important to use our resources in a way which means we are getting help to those who most need it. We already have a team based at the centre which works with people who sleep rough in the city but we felt we needed to enhance how we worked in order to ensure it helps people get the other professional support that they need.”

“We all know that there is going to be less funding for public services but this isn’t just about money, it is about targeting help to some of the most vulnerable in our city. Many of the people we see have significant health problems and by ensuring that we get the right services to them before they need emergency or acute treatment not only makes life more tolerable for them but it also makes economic sense too,” said Mr Fowler.

The new service will offer a more structured programme of support for people using the service and will not only assist people with their accommodation needs but ensure people access the right services for their needs. It will also provide training and education on a range of topics from confidence building to healthy eating, cooking and budgeting skills.

“The majority of homeless people have suffered a relationship breakdown with either a partner of parents,” said Mr Fowler, “Many get by without the things that that we all take for granted. Having the confidence and knowledge to get the right help when they need it and possessing general living skills is often something that our service users have never had. The new service, which is scheduled to open on 6th December, aims to address these challenges.

In the meantime Coventry Cyrenians is in the process of organising its traditional Christmas dinner for homeless people which will be held at the Central Methodist Hall on Christmas Day. Anyone who wishes to make a donation in support of this activity or who would like to volunteer to help on the day can get in touch with the Cyrenians on 0800 0180 579.

It's all the fashion

Coventry Cyrenians have entered into an exciting and innovative collaboration with Coventry Trading Standards to recycle the thousands of counterfeit garments seized each year. In a carefully regulated scheme, branded counterfeit garments are being deconstructed and converted into fashionable and desirable clothes. Working closely with the Coventry University fashion and design departments, students are working on a variety of designs. One of the aims is to involve a large number of our young clients, most of whom possess no qualifications and limited employment prospects, in an accredited training scheme that will produce a relevant qualification at the end of the process.

The potential benefits of this project to clients and the organisation are limitless, so watch this space!

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