Stockport Express Update 23-11-16

Jonathan Billings Project Manager The Wellspring.

The governments Homelessness Reduction Bill is welcome news to us at The Wellspring. If the bill becomes law then local authority’s will have a duty to provide people with advice and services when they are at risk of becoming homeless. Preventing homelessness is something that we have been doing at The Wellspring for many years. The vast majority of support work that takes places at The Wellspring is around preventing homelessness. In 2015 we provided just short of 11,000 individual pieces of support work. Around 60% of this is work is targeted to prevent homelessness from occurring in the first place. In some cases preventing homelessness can be very simple pieces of work, simple phone calls, ticking boxes on online forms, ensuring that people are claiming the correct benefits, tackling issues around anti-social behaviour and doing the ground work to repair broken relationships. Other cases can be much more complex and difficult to resolve mainly due to issues around drugs, alcohol, mental health and criminality. We will continue to provide preventative services for people at The Wellspring as preventing homelessness from occurring is the only way to reduce the number of people becoming homeless on our streets.

The Wellspring is again hosting The Rucksack Project on Sunday 4^th December. We are looking for donations of warm winter clothing, rucksacks and sleeping bags. Over the next 12 months and especially the winter months we give out these donations to people who find themselves sleeping rough on our streets. These vital donations not only provide people with some protection from the cold weather but they also provide The Wellspring staff with the opportunity to engage with people and develop a trusting relationship with them which hopefully will lead to them getting off the streets for good. The Wellspring has an excellent success rate of supporting homeless people off the streets, the donations to The Rucksack project certainly assists us in doing this. More information about The Rucksack project can be found on our website www.thewellspring.co.uk

We currently have some volunteering opportunities available at The Wellspring, if anyone is interested in joining one of our volunteer teams please email volunteer@thewellspring.co.uk or contact Alex on 0161-477-6344.