1-7 June is Volunteers’ Week, a time to celebrate the incredible work of volunteers who bring so much to organisations such as Thames Reach. With almost 100 active volunteers in teams across London, they are highly valued in helping our work towards ending street homelessness, and are very much part of the Thames Reach community. Kelly McLoughlin, volunteer programmes manager, speaks about her role coordinating around 100 volunteers, and shares how inspiring it is to work alongside such dedicated individuals and groups.

Describe your role as volunteer programmes manager. What is it about the role that you enjoy the most?

I’m responsible for organising all volunteer activity at Thames Reach, whether that is corporate efforts or individuals, and across all our different projects and services. Part of the role is also building and maintaining relationships with organisations who offer volunteering through their staff or students. Volunteers who are currently studying at university are really valuable to us and bring a lot of energy and commitment, so keeping those relationships are important. Anything that comes to Thames Reach in relation to volunteering would come through me.

My favourite part of the role is probably being able to share in the achievements of our volunteers; having the chance to celebrate them is important, and we have a few initiatives that mark and reward their good work. Volunteers are always humble, and often surprised when they are celebrated or rewarded; sometimes they don’t realise the profound impact they have on the people we work with.

Why do you believe Volunteers’ Week to be so important?

It’s a great opportunity to have time to dedicate to reflecting on the work that volunteers do every day. As an organisation and in individual teams, it gives us the chance to share stories and successes that have come from volunteering. This year, we have created and scheduled additional opportunities for volunteers, to make sure they are able to get more out of their experience. These training sessions will be based around new themes that we are coming across in our work, such as social isolation post-Covid. We’re also planning a summer event for volunteers to come together and celebrate their hard work.

How has the landscape of volunteering changed in recent times?

We have a large and committed pool of volunteers, but since the pandemic we have had to re-assess whether certain roles can be done remotely, as quite a few people left London during this time, and while some had to isolate. We lost a volume of volunteers altogether after Brexit, as some left the country for good. However the pandemic brought about a lot of people wanting to give back to their community, and we had a great response from people continuing volunteering with us once they had gone back to work, so again we needed to be creative with the sorts of roles people could do, such as outside normal working hours or in corporate groups.

What are the different volunteering roles that people can get involved with?

They can be split into three groups depending on the interests and availability of the individual volunteer: front-line, which would be accompanying staff on outreach visits during the day or at night, or front of house and reception roles; employment, which might be skill-sharing and mentoring, or helping out with our Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) service in our Employment and Skills team; and wellbeing, which usually involves activities such as art workshops and helping combat social isolation. There are so many ways to volunteer with us, and our shared commitment means that there are so many ways that we can work together to help people affected by street homelessness.

If you are interested in volunteering at Thames Reach and working with us towards our vision of ending street homelessness, please email volunteermanagers@thamesreach.org.uk

Alex is an assistant support worker with the PLACE (Pan-London Accommodation and Community Engagement) team, a service initially set up to help people find sustainable accommodation after receiving support through the government’s Everyone In initiative back in 2020. Prior to this, she volunteered with STAR (Sustaining Tenancies, Accommodation and Resettlement), a homelessness prevention partnership service within Thames Reach. She discusses the journey from volunteering to employment, and how the experience has helped shape her career.

What was your volunteering experience like, and what tasks did you do?

I started out volunteering with the STAR team from January 2021 until November that year. It’s important to do volunteering for a sustained amount of time so that people you are helping have that level of consistency. I was their Romanian-speaking volunteer, and went out on outreach shifts to locations that were known rough sleeping spots. I helped out with translation where we were looking for people with Romanian as their first language; this then evolved into shadowing support workers in the team. I helped with evaluating and following up on client progress, then helped putting together a database of services around London, so we could easily signpost for things such as immigration, legal advice, food banks and mental health.

What is your current role and how is the workload different from volunteering?

I am now assistant support worker with the PLACE team, and have been since November, so I applied for the role while still volunteering. The project was set up to find permanent accommodation from the temporary provisions offered during the Everyone In initiative. We work with housing associations to match tenants with flats, making sure people have the support and signposting they need, whether this is mental health or substance support, and we refer to Thames Reach’s Employment and Skills team regularly too. I have my own caseload and work with people from the start of their recovery journey, and also work as part of the Keeping in Touch service, making sure people are secure in their tenancy once they’ve been placed in accommodation.

What brought you to Thames Reach?

I had been interested in homelessness for a while, and wanted to know exactly how I could help. I wanted to be able to offer direct support for people experiencing homelessness, and really contribute to the good work being done. I also wanted to see the reality of homelessness, as in London you walk past a lot of people who are street homeless but never really get the full story.

What advice would you give to someone considering volunteering?

I gained a lot more than I was expecting from the experience, so I would say keep an open mind and really get involved. It really opened up different ideas and opportunities for me. The team were happy to share their knowledge and expertise with me, so don’t feel worried that you don’t know enough, because it’s definitely a learning experience. I was able to have an overview of all the things I could potentially do in the team, so felt that I was making a difference and getting a lot back.

If you are interested in volunteering with Thames Reach, check out our Volunteers page here or email volunteermanagers@thamesreach.org.uk

At the start of April, Thames Reach took over the service Lewisham IHASS (Intensive Housing Advice and floating Support Service) with a new contract. The team’s work will prevent homelessness in the borough with their person-centred approach, addressing the specific needs of the individual, whether this is mental health, tenancy sustainment or drug and alcohol support. We spoke with the service’s new lead manager, Michael, who introduced their work.

Can you give us an introduction to your new service?

We are a homelessness prevention service being commissioned by Lewisham council, with referrals being made from Lewisham Housing Solutions and Lewisham Adult Social Care. The idea is to support people into accommodation and make sure it’s sustainable and suitable for them; we are floating support, so meet people where they are as opposed to a day centre functionality. The team have been TUPED [transferred] over from One Housing, who held the contract before us, so it’s a really experienced team. They all know the services available in Lewisham, so we have the contacts we need to signpost for substance support, mental health, the job centre etc. We want to make sure we are a brief intervention service; when we receive referrals, we look to contact the individual within 24 hours and invite them into the service to meet and discuss their needs.

We are solutions-focused, and look to see how we can get people into employment or training, or education if that’s what they want to do. The ultimate goal is to get people as independent as possible in order to sustain their accommodation. Our work will also include mental health support and cessation of smoking if that’s something they need help with, promoting healthy living and wellbeing, widening their networks.

How does Lewisham IHASS work with other teams within Thames Reach?

We’ll be working closely with the Employment and Skills team to help people access training such as improving their English language skills. We also have close ties with the financial resilience worker, who is really important as she helps people with upskilling, getting back into work and managing their finances better. Our EUSS (European Union Settlement Scheme) worker will also work with people who are working on their Settled status, if they need assistance with their application. As I said, we are a brief intervention service, so want to work with people for a maximum of six months. If we can identify their needs quickly, we can work better as a homelessness prevention service.

If you are only working with people for a short period of time, does this imply that support needs are generally low?

Not necessarily, we have a wide range of people that we are working with. Some have come through the criminal justice system, one person we’re working with at the moment has just left supported accommodation, which wasn’t working for them, and they’ve also come off their [methadone] script. The people we are working with may have come from supported accommodation and they need that next step towards living independently, so we are here to listen to what people need for them to gain that independence. There will be people with low needs, but also those with medium needs, and complexities.

People being referred to our service might have presented to the council as being at risk of homelessness, perhaps they need advocacy to protect their tenancies, so they may not be sleeping rough but they are having issues with their tenancy, maybe they are in arrears.

Although the service was only taken over by Thames Reach at the start of April, what are the objectives for the coming months? How are you measuring your success?

As a brief intervention service, if we can support and signpost people effectively in a short amount of time, that is a success. Making sure we have systems in place to help people is enabling us to do this well; people come to us with a range of issues, and we need to know that we can help them quickly and effectively, to avoid it leading to homelessness. We work in a person-focused way, offering really good options to people and linking them in with services thanks to the partnerships we have in the community.

Thames Reach are committed to developing and running services that directly prevent homelessness. Please refer to our 2022-2025 Business Plan for more details on how we plan to implement this, based on ongoing successes. This includes “an assertive approach that aims to identify and work with people before problems lead to a housing breakdown” and developing “existing and new relationships with London local authorities” as projects such as Lewisham IHASS are usually commissioned this way. Lewisham IHASS is the latest service to follow this plan towards our vision of ending street homelessness, and we are pleased to be expanding our prevention service.

We have today published the Thames Reach Business Plan 2022-25, which will set the direction of our organisation over the next three years.

The new Business Plan will see us continue to focus on three main types of service aimed at ending rough sleeping: prevention, intervention, and recovery.

Our vision

Our vision remains a society where street homelessness is ended and nobody need sleep rough on the streets. In pursuit of this vision, our mission is to ensure that every person Thames Reach supports is able to find and sustain a decent home, build supportive relationships, and lead a fulfilling life.

Our services under the new Thames Reach Business Plan

The plan outlines a number of measures by which we will judge the impact of our work. A key of indicator of progress towards the fulfilment of our vision, as outlined in the Business Plan, is the number of people who sleep rough in London. We intend to double the size of our intervention services, such as hostels and outreach work, over the course of the next three years.

We will develop and disseminate new approaches to prevention. This includes the identification of peo­ple at risk, and ways of providing support without people becoming dependent upon it. We aim to become sector leaders in this area of work.

When it comes to our recovery services, we will judge their effectiveness through the number of people successfully moving on from using these services, as they journey on towards independent living.

Thames Reach Chief Executive speaks about the Business Plan

Thames Reach Chief Executive Bill Tidnam said: ‘The 2022-25 Business Plan outlines the direction of travel for Thames Reach over the next three years. It reiterates our commitment to the goal of ending rough sleeping in London and sets out our ambitious plans to support this work; the need for a new approach to prevention; as well as our intention of working with partners to increase our impact and the effectiveness of our services.’

To read the Thames Reach Business Plan 2022-25, click here.

Thames Reach’s Tenancy Sustainment Team (TST) South are looking for volunteers to help people recover from street homelessness and maintain independent accommodation across South London.

Volunteers are offered training, ongoing support and expenses. Volunteering is a great way to gain experience and learn new skills, help towards getting a paid role in the sector, or to make meaningful use of your spare time. We welcome and encourage volunteers with lived experience of homelessness, recovery, and mental health.

We offer the opportunity to work from different locations in West, South or East London, for half a day or a full day at a range of different times, including opportunities to help us on late afternoons and evenings (Monday to Friday).

Please have a look at the roles listed below. If you’re interested in applying for a role, please fill out the application form here. Feel free to get in touch with any questions at: volunteermanagers@thamesreach.org.uk.

Tenancy Intervention and Welfare (TIW) volunteer: The TIW volunteer will support staff when clients are at risk of losing their homes or when clients need support to stay safe within their community. Some travel across London will be needed to visit clients, but full travel expenses are paid. Experience of working with vulnerable people is desirable and we welcome applications from Social Work/Social Care students (plese see below for details).

Welcome volunteer: We are seeking volunteers to support clients who are new to the TST. You will help people build confidence and make connections in their local community. This role will be a mixture of telephone support and travel around London. Good IT skills and a polite telephone manner will be important for this role.

Social Isolation volunteer: Volunteers are needed for informal support for clients who are experiencing loneliness or isolation. Support will involve helping people to be well connected to their community.

Keeping In Touch (KIT) volunteer: KIT  is a telephone support service, giving clients the opportunity to informally “check in” if they need to speak to someone in the TST. Volunteers will help direct the calls and offer a low level of support over the phone. Good IT skills and a polite and friendly telephone manner are needed for this role.

Placements: We welcome student placements in the team. If you are over 18 years old, you can take part in a placement in our TST for a minimum of twelve weeks as part of your course, in teams across London. In recent years, students on social work, mental health and social science courses have gained a great deal of experience from these placements. Please send us an email at volunteermanagers@thamesreach.org.uk to enquire.

Gemma, lead manager of our Greenwich Navigators team, explains how the service is working to help people with medium and high support needs recover from the trauma of street homelessness in the borough of Greenwich.

Can you introduce Greenwich Navigators to anyone who may not know what you do?

Greenwich Navigators is a service commissioned by the council to support people who have had experiences sleeping rough. We work with people with a range of needs, but mostly medium-to-high, and complex, support needs, who have either been sleeping rough or are at risk of becoming street homeless. The team has different specialisms, for example we have an assessment worker who will work with the individual to see what support needs they have, and how best they can move on from sleeping rough; we also have an outreach support worker who works a lot with London Street Rescue, but the role sits in the Navigators team.

What kinds of support needs do the people you work with have, and how are you able to support them?

So as medium to high, or complex needs, this might include drug and alcohol issues, mental health, physical health or trauma. Generally, we work with people who have recourse to public funds, so it is easier to help people getting into private rented sector accommodation, however with SWEP (Severe Weather Emergency Protocol) and ‘Everyone In’, we have been able to support people make applications for their settled status, both in partnership with the EUSS team at Thames Reach and our partnership work with Southwark Law Centre via their partnership with Greenwich council.

Have you noticed any changes in the work you do recently? Are the demographics of people changing at all?

There are definitely more people coming onto the streets for the first time, with no rough sleeping history. Usually this can mean that they have lower support needs, but what we’re finding is people are becoming street homeless who were receiving support from family or loved ones, perhaps they were shielding. With ‘Everyone In’, SWEP and Protect and Vaccinate initiatives, it means people coming onto the street for the first time are not there for a long time before being found by outreach teams and offered support.

When you are working with people with these kind of support needs, what are the housing options?

We have some Housing First provisions in Greenwich, and have had some supported housing with Peabody, which involves some floating support [visiting people in their own homes, providing support to prevent homelessness] for people in their new accommodation. We also work closely with Thames Reach’s TST (Tenancy Sustainment Team), so if they need ongoing support to sustain their accommodation as well as look after their wellbeing, they will have a support worker.

“I joined Thames Reach through the Traineeship in 2011. Having worked in organisations before which were more focused on policy and lobbying government, I was keen to get some experience of front-line support work. I was attracted to Thames Reach as a very practical organisation and hoped the Traineeship would give me a way in to the sector. I started in Stamford Street, as it was then known, and then moved to another hostel, Graham House, for my second placement. I found the Traineeship to be a really positive experience, a good mix of being thrown in at the deep end and getting support and guidance from the people I worked with. I learnt from my mistakes and saw the creative and consistent work done by our organisation first hand, often shadowing more experienced colleagues. I was able to stay on after my Traineeship ended, getting a job in the Graham House team, and have worked in a few of our different projects over the years, leading to my current job as the area manager for hostels. I think the Traineeship is a great opportunity for anyone looking to start their career in the sector, and I look forward to seeing who applies for this year’s scheme as a member of the interview panel.”

The deadline for this year’s Traineeship programme has been extended to 20 February. Click here for more details and how to apply.

Can you tell us about how the Employment and Skills team are helping people Thames Reach are already working with?
We are always looking to increase the numbers of people we work with, and offer a range of support such as basic skills training, which includes digital literacy, traditional literacy and English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). We have a job broker in our teams who can set people up with employment; we have strong relationships with many employers, especially in construction, hospitality, retail, and security sectors. We acknowledge that not everyone will be ready to go straight into a new job, and many people will have gaps in their CVs where life experiences have taken place, so we can also help people become job-ready, with CV support and interview preparation.

Once people are at that stage and in employment, we are also committed to helping people get better paid work, particularly meeting the London Living Wage. We often organise employer engagement events, where we invite employers in to meet potential candidates, so we can demystify the interview and recruitment process as much as possible. They are always popular and have been very successful. For those who may not be ready for work yet, we provide volunteering opportunities to help people gain confidence, experience and get into a good routine.

Why is it so important to work collaboratively with other Thames Reach teams?
Internal teams have good relationships with the people they work with, and know them really well; some of the work we do will be a brief intervention so that the individual can take that next step. It’s so important that the relationships of trust are maintained between the individual, their support worker and the Employment and Skills team. If we can understand the challenges and the barriers that are preventing people from moving forward, we can use the resources we have to help them in the most suitable way. We work with the TST (Tenancy Sustainment Team) a great deal, all outreach teams, and sometimes hostels. We also have a strong relationship with the EUSS (European Union Settlement Scheme) team, and a good track record of signposting people to the right service to complete successful immigration status applications. This is a vital part of the process of helping people avoid street homelessness.

Do you offer support to people with a range of needs?
When we have referrals from all different teams at Thames Reach, as well as the wider community, we work with a wide range of people; some may be currently sleeping rough and receiving support through outreach teams, while some people will be in secure housing. To maintain contact, we need to find out if they have access to a mobile phone. We work with an organisation called Community Calling to get people phones so that they can keep in contact with not only us and their support worker, but of course their wider support networks. We then need to know if they are available for work, when they last worked, and what kind of upskilling they might need. Even if people are staying temporarily in hostels, night shelters or hotels, without long-term fixed addresses, we can still help them into work. For some people without fixed addresses, they may have limited entitlement to benefits, so finding work quickly is important.

Our work lies in both preventing street homelessness and helping people recover from it. Getting people into work is not always straightforward and involves a lot of personalised support around improving confidence and self-esteem as well as skills. It is important that we facilitate up-skilling; sustainable work is one of the most important things in supporting people away from homelessness.

Deptford Reach has been at the heart of the community in Lewisham for many years. During the early stages of the pandemic, the building had to close, but instead of ceasing services, this became an opportunity to expand beyond the building the team are ordinarily based in, to reach more people in need around the borough. Its lead manager, Jordan, discusses the essential work they do in the community.

In Deptford Reach’s current working model, how are you working with people who have been using your service for a while, and members of the wider community?  

At present we have three main areas we focus on: a rough sleepers support hub; advice and case work, and health and wellbeing. The Deptford Reach building provides space and respite for people experiencing homelessness, and there they can access advice and facilities such as showers and laundry. The health part is really important, and once a week we have visits from a dentist, nurse, GP and drug and alcohol support workers. We also help people get access to their own GP practice to help people resettle into their community.

Can you tell us about the prevention aspect of Deptford Reach and how this works?

Prevention is important, and we are always looking for new ways to get to people before homelessness occurs. As part of the advice service, we offer advice and casework in, benefits, debt, arrears, housing advice, tenancy sustainment, homelessness and other general advice. Monday to Friday we are in the building, and members of our team attend food banks across Lewisham as well. From the new year, the centre will be shut on Fridays, with staff based in the women’s sanctuary at the local 999 Club and food banks. We attend a different food bank every day of the week to provide a drop-in advice service. Expanding this service means we can engage with people who would otherwise not come to a building-based service; it definitely makes it more accessible.

Does the service change at all in winter and cold weather?

Our rough sleepers support hub is usually extended for a few more hours to make sure people have the support they need and don’t go into freezing temperatures early in the morning. There is always a bigger demand in winter with added urgency to be accommodated and higher engagement levels. As for this year, the new variant has meant that more people who had been sofa-surfing are coming to us needing advice and emergency accommodation.

As you work with people at different stages of exposure to homelessness (prevention, intervention, recovery), do you find that you are using the Hard to Reach Fund to support people’s move-on journey?

We often have a need for it, widely for people resettling and allowing people to engage, with both us and other networks in their lives. So housing items and furniture, or everyday items such as Oyster cards, phones and credit.

Looking towards 2022, what does the future hold for your work?

We are working with Thames Reach’s Employment and Skills team to offer help accessing education and employment; financial resilience; digital skills, and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) to people who use our services, whether in the building or in our outreach work. When we work outside of the Deptford Reach base, the community does not lose out on services, and we are expanding our reach of people needing our help. We have a women’s group and an art group at the moment but we’re minimising activities in the building, so we have more scope to reach people elsewhere in the community in different locations. As we’re focused on prevention and sustainment, everything will be based around advice, so we can support people towards independency as much as possible in the long-term. At the moment we are collecting data to see where the needs are in the local community.

During winter, freezing cold temperatures make sleeping rough even more life-threatening. Whilst street homelessness is always dangerous and traumatic, there are extra statutory provisions called SWEP (Severe Weather Protocol), implemented when the ground temperature drops to zero degrees. This increases the temporary accommodation options that are available for our outreach teams to move people away from the streets, and prevent the dangers of sleeping outside in freezing temperatures. However, this will not solve the wider and ongoing causes of street homelessness. Tailored support is still required to understand, and address, the causes of an individual’s homelessness.

Liam is a support worker in our City Outreach team. He shares his experiences of helping people in the square mile once temperatures drop to dangerous levels:

“Thames Reach have been running the City Outreach service for just over a year, so we’re quite a new team but it’s really encouraging that we can help people off the streets in the City. We have outreach shifts every day, and as a team we work with new referrals ourselves, helping people get into emergency accommodation or the City assessment centre.

“With the temperature dropping significantly in recent days and weeks, and the Severe Weather Protocol (SWEP) being activated, we have been having a big push to get as many people off the streets as possible, so there’s a big positive movement in that sense. It’s good to see a lot of the people who have been entrenched on the streets for a long time being offered accommodation and support, so we’re really proud of that.

“We use the Hard to Reach Fund every day in our team; we have money to help people in the process of moving on with their lives. The most common thing we spend money on is phones so we can stay in touch with people. If someone is staying in a hostel, it’s easy to contact them but if they are on the streets it is much harder. We also provide food and shopping vouchers for people moving into accommodation; we don’t just drop them off, we make sure they are supported.

“Although we’re a new team, working with the City of London has been brilliant, we’ve been able to get people into hotels instantly with SWEP, which is great on many levels. Most of our work with people is done on the streets, which isn’t ideal; it’s so much easier to have a real conversation with someone and work on their recovery when they’re somewhere comfortable and can have a cup of tea. When we are getting people into temporary accommodation for the time being, we are able to assign them a support worker who can check in on them regularly and help them work out their next steps.”

Your donations can help us support people to come off the streets for good, and make the recovery journey tailored to the individual.