MAGGS DAY CENTRE
We work with homeless and vulnerable people to raise self-confidence thereby enabling positive life change. We achieve this through providing 2 Day Centres (Worcester and Malvern), clothing store, countywide outreach who go anywhere rough sleepers are located, harm reduction working with people not engaged in substance misuse services and accommodation project providing homes with support to rough sleepers until they are able to live independently
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Rough sleepers face significant barriers such as finding and then sustaining a home due to lacking the skills to maintain a tenancy or access other services. Our aim is to give rough sleepers the opportunities to develop the skills needed to re-join conventional society, through a staged approach i.e., accessing outreach/ day centres, engaging with services, finding accommodation, supported in the accommodation, developing the skills to maintain a home, then moved into independent living. There are no barriers that cannot be resolved only obstacles that may need to be worked round or addressed.
Everyone deserves the right to a home, and without a home a persons life expectancy reduces to 47 years of age. But some people need support to achieve this.
Without the support provided by our Tenancy Support Workers, many of the rough sleepers who we house would return to the streets. The consequences of them returning to the streets would be that their life quality would very poor, their life expectancy very short, and they likely to return to substance abuse and criminal and anti-social behaviour.
Removing rough sleepers from the streets long-term is not only a benefit to them but also a benefit to society and to the economy as the costs of accommodating rough sleepers are lower than the costs they generate through arrests, attendance at A and E and other agency costs.
The basis of the project is that we house former rough sleepers in shared houses as "move on" accommodation, and over a period of 6 months they learn all the skills that they will need to manage a tenancy in self-contained accommodation.
At that point they will move on to housing provided by mainstream housing provider such as Housing Associations, and therefore as they move out, more bed spaces will be made available in our HMOs for us to house some more rough sleepers, thus providing more longer term housing solutions compared to if we just rented a property, meaning that we can support more people. We work on the basis that 6 months is sufficient time to learn the skills needed to manage a tenancy, but no-one will be asked to move on to mainstream accommodation before they are ready. The last thing we want is for them not to be able to manage and end up back on the streets.