Aviva Community Fund has provided £4,243 of match funding
Help for the homeless and vulnerable in Leeds
Armley, England, United Kingdom
Aim
To help the homeless, vulnerable, families living in poverty and anyone struggling with mental health in Leeds
Vulnerable Citizen Support is a Leeds- based organisation which helps anyone struggling with no judgement, red tape or complicated referrals.
We run a food bank and welfare centre in Leeds, we help the homeless and offer rehabilitation support to those who need it, we deliver around 250 food parcels a week to struggling families and individuals and we try and support anyone struggling with mental health issues.
Last month we launched a football team – VCS United – to support people, and especially men, suffering with mental health issues and provide an outlet where they can gain support.
What we'll do with the funding
We want to raise £5,000 to reach more people and make a bigger difference to the lives of those who need it. This money would allow us to pay the wages of a desperately needed support worker to help more homeless and vulnerable people on the streets and in our welfare centre - most of our amazing team are currently volunteers.
It would also help towards costs for our container home community, which will give homeless people a second chance at a sustainable future and we could keep our food bank stocked for a few weeks – at the moment supplies are running low as more and more families struggle with the school holidays.
Our mental health awareness football team also needs money to survive - as Covid has hit so many people financially, many players cannot afford subs to pay for kit and refereeing for matches or ground fees. We want this team to be inclusive not exclusionary on financial grounds - it's a diverse team with players from all walks if life coming together to raise awareness of mental health issues.
https://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/health/emotional-first-victory-for-new-leeds-grassroots-football-team-to-support-mental-health-awareness-3324456
Transforming lives - Josh's story
Our ethos is to transform lives, like Josh's in the video above, offering a sustainable second chance. At just 25, Josh had been sleeping rough for two years. The death of his father, and some mistakes that he had made, had led him into addiction to spice and crack cocaine. In December, we met Josh and through some generous donations we were able to place him in a B & B over Christmas to start rebuilding his life. Now, through hard work and determination, he has been clean for six weeks, has a job at a local landscaping firm and is living in his own property.
Josh is just the tip of the iceberg though – there are many other people like this that we have helped who want to remain anonymous, and even more that still need help. We want to transform more lives like this - people who have taken one wrong turn or experienced misfortune and need some long-term support to get back on track.
Mental health support and VCS United
Mental health issues are currently at an all-time high, and we are seeing more and more people contact us for help in this area. In the past month alone, we have dealt with six mental health calls and we want to be able to offer intensive support and a safety net to more people suffering with mental health issues who are often struggling to find help elsewhere.
By March this year, around one in 5 adults experienced some form of depression, up 19% from last November, according to the Office of National Statistics. Last year the Samaritans also reported that male suicide was higher than it had been for two decades, with Yorkshire and the Humber recording the highest rates of 20.6 per 100,000 people.
With this in mind, we have established a grassroots football team to promote awareness of mental health and encourage people, especially men to speak out and enjoy sport. Anyone who needs support to improve their mental health is encouraged to attend training sessions, even if they don't want to play and just want someone to talk to.
https://www.facebook.com/1353601811339870/posts/4685797718120246/
Food bank and welfare centre
From our welfare centre, we provided more than 105,000 meals last year, helped more than 500 families with baby essential baby supplies and rehoused 15 homeless families. Our ethos is that we will help anyone who needs it with no judgement, no complicated referrals and no red tape. Since we set up a year ago, we have helped those fleeing domestic violence, found permanent and temporary beds for people sleeping on the streets, fought eviction and deportation cases and much more.
As we are currently halfway through the Summer holidays, more and more families are struggling to feed their children and we desperately need funds to keep our food bank stocked and continue delivering our food parcels.
Container home project
We are also attempting to build Leeds' first container home project as part of our provision to help the homeless. Our idea is simple but similar concepts have proven to be hugely effective in other parts of the UK. We have started building a micro-home from a donated shipping container that will provide self-contained living space for one person for six months. That six months will be a lifeline, during which time our organisation will provide employability training, support looking for jobs, or referrals and liaison with other agencies that can help with a permanent housing solution. Our first home is almost complete and we have secured a piece of land to build more - we just need to raise the funds to kickstart the project, pay the rent on the land and build more homes so we can turn around more lives.
Post-pandemic, there are more people in Leeds struggling with food poverty, mental health issues, housing problems and homelessness than ever before and we would like to help as many of them as we possibly can. Could you pledge to our project, helping us to help more people and making an amazing difference to other people's lives?
This project successfully funded on 21st September 2021