So it’s inspiring to look back at our history and remember we’ve been doing this for 35 years. That we’ve been through tough times before.
This is an excerpt from an interview with Sarah Gorman, talking about increasing needs in the 90s. Sarah was a frontline member of staff and, later, Chair of the board. Working with Jo Grant, she played a huge part in making us who we are today.
“At the time, a lot of our residents were living quite independently but the social context began to change. Drugs became much more freely available and there was a lot of difficulty around benefits.
“The level of need massively escalated and we began to get a lot of referrals from social services and young people leaving care, because there wasn’t a lot of help for them. There was a massive group of people who were incredibly needy.”
Needless to say, we did adapt, and today we have four programmes to help people journey out of homelessness.
A good reminder to keep the faith.