August 19, 2007
Christmas is coming!
At least preparations have started for this Crisis Open Christmas 2007. To be totally honest, I'm sure that the permanent Open team have been preparing for it since the last one finished, but I'm not part of that.
Yesterday was the Key Volunteers Forum, which was held at Crisis Skylight on Commercial Street.
The forum was a chance for Key Vols to come together, discuss what worked well last year, what didn't and to find out what changes are afoot for this year's Open and Crisis as a whole.
We learned that four of the buildings that were used as centres last year have now been demolished and the hunt to secure suitable replacements is well under way - this year the plan is to have eight centres, up from seven, so the task is that bit harder... if any of my three avid readers knows of an empty building in centralish London, do drop me a line.
Actually, I walked past the 'East Centre' yesterday and took this snap of it on my mobile phone - it has indeed been razed to the ground and that's a crane picking over the ruins.
Happily the overall trend is that homelessness in the UK is falling, although as Crisis CEO Leslie Morphy told us, many rough sleepers aren't counted in the official figures and the number of homeless people from the Accession 8 countries continues to rise. This is something that has been obvious for several years and Polish/Russian speaking interpreters are highly sought after for COC. We were also told that we might see an increase in the number of ex-squaddies coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.
I was particularly pleased to hear that Crisis is embracing the Internet for training purposes - with 6,500 volunteers last year and 1,000 more expected this time, it's not possible for the charity to extend face-to-face training to everybody. Starting in October, vols will be able to visit a secure part of the Crisis website and access courses in several essential areas.
Key vols will also have the opportunity of a couple of days training in September - on week days, so if I want to attend (I do) I'll have to take time off work. The subjects are 'homelessness' and 'conflict management' - I'll write an description of the courses when I've done them, assuming they're not full already.
The focus of the somewhat controversial Drinkers Centre is changing - Crisis will place more emphasis on it as being a dependency centre (rather than just being a 24-hour party venue... I bet it'll still be the most fun centre though!) which strikes me as sensible.
The policy of several smaller centres with centrally allocated services is continuing, albeit with tweaks that will recognise the different needs of each centre - I was surprised to hear that the volume of services delivered to guests last year was up last year. As I was at the 'Main Centre' for several years prior to 2006, it seemed to me that fewer services were on offer, but I guess that just demonstrates that the smaller centres were poorly served until last year.
I wonder if I'll be running the front gate at one of the centres again this year?
Posted by dompannell at August 19, 2007 12:27 PM