Day 32: Shelter
Day 32: Shelter
Website: www.shelter.org.uk/
Shelter is a charity that works to alleviate the distress caused by homelessness and bad housing. They do not provide housing themselves, but offer help and advice to people find and keep a home - their work focuses to a large extent on preventing people becoming homeless in the first place and helping them to finding emergency accommodation and get back on their feet. Shelter believes everyone should have a home (despite their estimate of someone being threatened by homelessness every two minutes).
I came to Shelter rather than any other national homelessness charity because they were linked by name as a particularly helpful group when I was researching domestic violence refuges. I was initially a bit confused by the way that the Shelter website seems to have a focus on protecting children from homelessness particularly - whilst I am obviously not in favour of children having no homes that did actually put me off donating to this particular charity slightly because as I understand it, there exist non-charity services to provide accommodation for children, and not so much for adults.
However on looking further it does appear to be the charity I expected: Shelter writes "Here are some of the past year's biggest achievements: We advised more than 84,000 people with specialist advice on housing, debt, care and welfare benefits problems. We launched two new helplines: to provide legal advice on housing and debt (answering more than 6000 calls) and to give mortgage advice to help prevent repossession (answering almost 3,000 calls). We lobbied with our partners to bring about protection for a third of a million private tenants if their landlord is repossessed; now made law by the Mortgage Repossessions Act, and successfully protected vulnerable families from unregulated sale and rent back schemes. We won a House of Lords ruling that women (:-p) fleeing domestic violence and staying in refuges must now be treated as homeless, with proper rights to find a permanent home. We campaigned for greater recognition of the damage the housing crisis has inflicted on thousands of families, showing the far-reaching consequences of how unaffordable housing affects us all."
Donation Page: england.shelter.org.uk/donate (linked off the English Shelter website)
Whilst investigating Shelter I also came across Crisis, a charity specifically for single homeless people.
Website: www.crisis.org.uk/index.php
Donation Page: community.crisis.org.uk/Page.aspx
I especially like their 'Crisis Kits' idea! Perhaps these could be the new Oxfam goat : community.crisis.org.uk/page.aspx