Mutiat has been receiving housing support, including advocacy for better, more suitable accommodation. Through an introduction to our team in Lewisham, and subsequent conversations, her key worker has been able to identify other areas of support she might need, including physical health support and digital skills classes.

“I met the team at Lewisham IHASS after I was referred from the council. I needed help with filling out forms for my housing.

“I really appreciate them; when I first needed their help, I needed an interpreter because my first language is Yoruba. My key worker could also speak Yoruba, so the process became much easier. When I was able to fill out the forms I needed for my housing, I was then offered support for a few other things. This came out of a conversation I had with my key worker, who was so nice.

“Through our conversations, I learned about the other kinds of support I could get help with.”

By having a good working relationship with her key worker, Mutiat realised that there were other things she could get support for; she didn’t need to struggle alone.

“I started a digital skills class a few weeks ago. It’s going well, and I’m learning how to do things on my phone that will make it easier to stay in touch with different people. I found out about the class when my key worker mentioned it to me, saying that there would be free classes in Deptford for people wanting to be more confident using phones and computers.”

Now she is gaining digital skills, what does the future look like for Mutiat?

“I am retired now, but the thing I like to do most is going out and meeting people. I have problems with my knee, but I am going towards being able to contact people and go out and see them.

“The team have been fantastic; they have really helped me with my housing. I’m very happy about them; they’ve been so nice and welcoming towards me. If anyone I know needs help, I would definitely introduce them to Thames Reach.”

Jasmine recently came into contact with Deptford Reach through their community outreach, making sure people in the community are receiving the support they need, such as maintaining tenancies, keeping track of financies and mental health. Deptford Reach are making a huge impact in Lewisham by being visible at food banks and other hubs in the area. In her own words, Jasmine talks about the support she has received from Deptford Reach, particularly support worker Shana.

“For over two years I have been struggling day-to-day. I had recently got married to my husband who isn’t from this country, so it took a long time for him to get authorisation to work. Eventually this took a toll on me as I was working part time with two children and a husband to feed. Due to the fact I was married, all my benefits were reduced even though my husband was not earning and he wasn’t entitled to benefits. I was left in despair and this affected my mental health to the point I would spend all day crying and feeling suicidal.

“I began visiting a food bank in Lewisham, but would just take my food and go, until one day I couldn’t contain my emotions and burst into tears. Someone working there took me to one side and asked how they could help.

“Then I was referred to a staff member from Deptford Reach called Shana. As a sufferer of mental health, namely depression, I was in tears and felt in a low mood, but Shana put me at ease straight away. Because of my financial struggle I explained my situation and was relieved to be told I could claim Universal Credit, which I wasn’t aware of. I was booked in the following week where I was assisted in completing the claim.

“My claim was accepted and I now have help paying my rent and still have a small amount of spare change to feed my family.

“I am very relieved that I now finally have extra financial support which has taken the stress away, that had been pushing me down for so long. I have Deptford Reach to thank for that.”

Thames Reach are the providers of the new South East London Regional Outreach team, which covers four boroughs within the South East of the city to help people off the streets and identify the support they need to move on from street homelessness. The team’s lead worker, Ryan, tells us about the work he does.

“The South East Regional Outreach Team (SEROT) is a new service that was put into place after London Street Rescue ended. This was the result of the decision for outreach services to be commissioned by local authorities. SEROT operates in four boroughs: Greenwich, Bromley, Lewisham, and Bexley. We get our referrals from colleagues in the Rapid Response Team (RRT), who respond to referrals made via Streetlink.

“No two days are ever the same, but an average day for me is an early start, checking for any referrals that were made overnight by the RRT and beginning welfare checks on anyone that is out rough sleeping, and working with them to resolve their homelessness. Working with people we have already made contact with, who are now in temporary accommodation, is a big part of what we do, as we discuss and plan their next steps with them. The rest of my work time is spent on casework and other admin related to the people I’m working with.

“In my borough, the people we work with are mostly white British males with substance support needs. This isn’t the case across South East London, as other boroughs work with a high number of people from other areas, with limited recourse to benefits. We fortunately have a strong working relationship with local drug and alcohol services, who will join an outreach shift when I am working with someone that would benefit from a visit.

“In South East London, I think we have all noticed a rise in the number of people rough sleeping for the first time, and I’m sure this goes for the rest of the country. The challenge is finding affordable, sustainable, decent living in London where most parts of the city are unaffordable.

“It has definitely been positive to work alongside colleagues that I worked with in London Street Rescue. This has meant that people who have been receiving support with us for a sustained period have not been affected by the changes.”

At Thames Reach, we’re looking for volunteers to help us deliver vital services across London to help end street homelessness. This includes working with our outreach teams to help people off the streets, helping out in local communities to prevent people from becoming homeless, and supporting our Employment and Skills team as they provide job and training opportunities for the people we work with.

If you want to learn new skills, get workplace experience, and make a real difference to the lives of people experiencing homelessness, then come to our volunteer fair.

Hosted by our Volunteering and Employment and Skills teams, this event will offer insight and opportunities for getting started as a Thames Reach volunteer.

Tuesday 1st November 2022
11.00am — 3.00pm
Employment Academy, 29 Peckham Road, London SE5 8UA

To book your place, please visit: Thames Reach Volunteer Fair Tickets, Tue 1 Nov 2022 at 11:00 | Eventbrite

Three projects from across London have been named as winners of the prestigious London Homelessness Awards for 2022.  They will share cash prizes totalling £60,000. The London Homelessness Awards are sponsored by London Housing Foundation, London Housing Directors, The Mayor of London, Crisis and Shelter.

The prize winners are: Greenwich Winter Night Shelter, Pathway Partnership Programme, and our Deptford Reach project, which has won a £10,000 prize at the award ceremony which took place at North London’s Union Chapel on 12 October. The awards were presented by Deputy Mayor Tom Copley.

Jordan McTigue, lead manager at Deptford Reach, says: “Winning this award means so much for both the people we work with, and us as a team, and will be a real boost to the work we are doing in the community. The prize money will go directly towards helping people facing homelessness, allowing us to reach them before they come to the streets. Being able to continue helping people where they are, through food banks, faith hubs and other community spots, is so essential as we start to face the reality of the cost-of-living crisis.”

Margaret Malcolm works with the London Housing Foundation and assessed all of the applicants.  She said: “With a strong field of over 30 applicants, each of these projects did well to get to the last six and are doing excellent work.  The presentations and stories they told were very powerful.   The winners all provide high quality services to a wide range of clients and showcase just how vibrant and innovative the homelessness sector in London continues to be.”

Bill Tidnam, Chief Executive at Thames Reach, said: “We welcome the London Homelessness Award’s recognition of the Deptford Reach community project.  If we are to meet our ambition of ending street homelessness we need many more services like this, which aim to intervene to find people at risk and work with them to help them stay in accommodation.”

Deptford Reach has recently expanded its service from a day centre to community outreach, working with people in Deptford and the surrounding Lewisham community to prevent homelessness, offer advice and guidance and signpost to other services. They do this in hubs across the borough such as food banks and faith centres, after finding that the stigma of homelessness and its surrounding issues mean that people are more likely to engage with support where they are, rather than coming to a day centre. The £10,000 prize will help Deptford Reach to continue this work and reach more people, as we face the additional challenge of the cost-of-living crisis.

Thames Reach welcomes the publication by the DLUHC (Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities) today of the new Rough Sleeping Strategy: Ending Rough Sleeping for Good.

The strategy reiterates and expands upon the government’s commitment to ending rough sleeping, and when it cannot, ensuring that it is rare, brief, and non-recurrent.  The adoption of this commitment, developed with the Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI), and charities and local authorities through the Rough Sleeping Advisory panel, moves the objective of ending rough sleeping from a lofty ambition to a practical and measurable goal.

This is accompanied by the commitment of funding over the next three years, building on the settlement following last autumn’s spending review. It will provide the stability necessary for organisations like Thames Reach to develop new and existing services to meet the many challenges set out in the strategy. 

We particularly welcome the investment in the different stages of our work: prevention, involving identifying and supporting people before they end up on the streets; response, working quickly to find people who are sleeping rough and get them to a safe place; and recovery, using accommodation and support models that enable people to move away from street homelessness. Working across prevention, response and recovery is central to Thames Reach’s vision of ending street homelessness, and are practices we know to be effective.

Alongside this, there is a focus on bringing government and services together to make sure that everyone is focused on ending homelessness. We need to make sure that prison is not a route onto the street, that health services work to ensure a health crisis does not lead to homelessness, and crucially that the transition away from local authority care is not the first step in a chain of events that lead to rough sleeping.

half the people on London’s streets are non-UK nationals and we welcome plans to make it much easier to establish people’s status and also to review the approach to accommodating people seeking asylum which can lead to people sleeping rough, particularly in London.

There is much work to be done, but it is crucial that the new administration builds on the lead provided by this strategy and the successful work of the last three years.

The Met Office has now issued a Level 3 Heat Health Alert for London. There is a 90% probability of Heat Health criteria (32°C) being met.

All boroughs in London have been encouraged to trigger their local arrangements for ensuring the health and wellbeing of people sleeping rough during the heatwave.

Outreach teams

Outreach teams are carrying out additional welfare checks, handing out bottled water and sun cream, in addition to assessing the needs of the individual and the standard procedure of helping people come off the streets safely into suitable accommodation.

The Mayor of London has made ‘Cool Spaces’ available to Londoners when temperatures are excessively high. Cool Spaces are areas where Londoners can take respite on hot days. Both Indoor and Outdoor Cool Spaces are available from 1 June to 15 September 2022. You can access an interactive map, which includes water fountains and accessible indoor spaces.

If you see someone sleeping rough, please contact Streetlink who will work with our outreach teams to locate them. Download the app or call 0300 500 0914.

Please be ready to tell Streetlink:
– An exact location of where this person is rough sleeping.You can do this by using a map to pinpoint the exact location and by providing a detailed written description of the location.
– The time that you saw the person sleeping rough at the location.
– Any additional information that will help the local team find the individual sleeping rough (gender, approximate age, what the person looks like, what they are wearing).

If you think someone is in need of urgent care or is in immediate danger, please call 999.

Three projects from across London have been named as winners of the prestigious London Homelessness Awards for 2022.  They will share cash prizes totalling £60,000.

The London Homelessness Awards are sponsored by London Housing Foundation, London Housing Directors, The Mayor of London, Crisis and Shelter.

We received over 30 applications for the awards and after visiting the six shortlisted projects and seeing their presentations, the judges have decided on the three top prize winners, with three other projects specially commended.

The prize winners are (in alphabetical order):

– Greenwich Winter Night Shelter

– Pathway Partnership Programme

– Thames Reach, Deptford Reach

Three further projects were particularly commended as making a special contribution to helping combat homelessness in London:

– Camden Adult Pathway Partnership (CAPP) team

– Providence Row Outreach Psychotherapy

– Riverside Street Buddies

The allocation of the prize money (first prize, £30,000, second, £20,000 and third £10,000), will be revealed at a special event at the Union Chapel on 12^th October, presented by Deputy Mayor Tom Copley.

Margaret Malcolm works with the London Housing Foundation and assessed all of the applicants.  She said: “With a strong field of over 30 applicants, each of these projects did well to get to the last six and are doing excellent work.  The presentations and stories they told were very powerful.   The winners all provide high quality services to a wide range of clients and showcase just how vibrant and innovative the homelessness sector in London continues to be.”

Bill Tidnam, Chief Executive at Thames Reach, said: “We welcome the London Homelessness Award’s recognition of the Deptford Reach community project.  If we are to meet our ambition of ending street homelessness we need many more services like this, which aim to intervene to find people at risk and work with them to help them stay in accommodation.”

The three winning projects (in alphabetical order) are:

– Greenwich Winter Night Shelter: A local charity which provides emergency accommodation and support for the homeless in Greenwich. Last year, they moved away from the traditional rotating night shelter to set up a static venue. With support from over 200 volunteers, GWNS now provides single-room accommodation for nine individuals (including a women’s-only wing), 1:1 casework and advocacy, and a pet friendly drop-in day centre where anyone who is homeless or vulnerably housed can access support and faciltiies. All services have been designed by guests through focus groups to work towards breaking the cycle of homelessness.

– Pathway: Since April 2021 five London hospitals (St Georges, Croydon, St Mary’s/Imperial, the Homerton and Ealing/Northwick Park) have introduced Pathway’s model of care for homeless patients and have signed up to Pathway’s Partnership support programme. The model is based on work pioneered at UCLH in 2009. In return for an annual fee, each team receives support and training from Pathway’s core staff, access to their on-line service manual and specialist support networks.

– Thames Reach: Thames Reach’s Deptford Reach service provides advice and support to people in the community at risk of, or experiencing, homelessness, working to resolve and signpost issues such as claiming benefits, employment, mental and physical health needs and unsuitable accommodation. Deptford Reach has always had a strong reputation for casework advice that helps prevent and resolve homelessness.  An enforced temporary closure due to the first lockdown, followed by a review of the service, allowed Deptford Reach to adapt to prevent homelessness more effectively. Having existed as a day centre for many years, stigmas around homelessness have meant that there is a demand for people to access support in different locations. The team now works in seven spaces across Lewisham. As a result, Deptford Reach now works with a wider range of people, offering drop-in crisis and brief intervention work, with a capacity to resolve complex needs that prevent the loss of accommodation.

details about the London Homelessness Awards can be found at www.lhawards.org.uk

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Notes to editors

Thames Reach is a charity based in London, supporting people facing homelessness through prevention, intervention, and recovery. The charity specialises in helping people with complex and multiple needs, including mental health and drug and alcohol use. It manages a range of services, including street outreach, frontline hostels, day services, specialist supported housing and employment and skills schemes. Thames Reach’s mission is to assist homeless and vulnerable adults to find decent homes, build supportive relationships and lead fulfilling lives. thamesreach.org.uk

For more information, please contact:

Thames Reach Communications team:

media@thamesreach.org.uk

22 June 2022

Thames Reach today announced it will be using free connectivity, via Vodafone’s charities.connected initiative, to tackle digital exclusion among people we work with in London. Distributed through the Employment and Skills team, connectivity packages will be given to people experiencing digital exclusion, allowing people to connect with vital resources including health services, support workers, employers and family and friends.

Vodafone’s charities.connected initiative is open to any registered charity that would benefit from free connectivity, either to improve its digital capability, extend its services or help the individuals and families it supports get online. Registered charities across London can apply for the free connectivity, in the form of SIM cards with 20GB data a month, plus free calls and texts, for six months [here].

Denise, lead worker at Thames Reach, said: “We have always been aware that many of the people we support are experiencing digital poverty. However, the pandemic highlighted even further that many were also ‘data poor’. This meant being further socially excluded from accessing vital services such as doctors, dentists, mental health services and seeking employment opportunities. In addition, they were unable to reach out to family and friends in their time of need which led to their further isolation. We are really pleased to have received these vital resources to pass on to the people we work with who need it the most.”

Emma Reynolds, Head of Communications, Sustainability and Regulatory Affairs at Vodafone UK said: “We are committed to tackling digital exclusion.  We hope that by providing free connectivity to Thames Reach and the other amazing charities across the UK who have such an enormous impact on their local communities, we can help create a more inclusive digital society.  We urge any organisation who thinks they can benefit to apply online and look forward to hearing how this connectivity has helped.”

Vodafone’s charities.connected initiative is part of its commitment to tackle digital exclusion and connect one million people by the end of 2022.

-Ends-

Notes to editors

Thames Reach is a charity based in London, supporting people facing homelessness through prevention, intervention, and recovery. The charity specialises in helping people with complex and multiple needs, including mental health and drug and alcohol use. It manages a range of services, including street outreach, frontline hostels, day services, specialist supported housing and employment and skills schemes. Thames Reach’s mission is to assist homeless and vulnerable adults to find decent homes, build supportive relationships and lead fulfilling lives. thamesreach.org.uk

Vodafone’s charities connected initiative was launched in August 2021.  For more information, see [here].

For more information, please contact:

Thames Reach Communications team

media@thamesreach.org.uk

Vodafone UK Media Relations Team

Email: ukmediarelations@vodafone.com

Tel: 01635 693693