The last night of our homeless drop-in sessions was well attended.  Over 20 guests came, were fed and shown that there are people who care about them.

Sanctuary will still continue throughout the weekday at Gravesend Methodist Church as will our pastoral support for them.

Preparations for Winter 2017-18

Our first drop-in of next autumn starts on Thursday 5^th October.  As per last year we will run these sessions on Thursday and Sunday nights.  The winter overnight shelter will start on Sunday 3^rd December.  Again, the venue at GMC will be open on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday nights.  We are also hoping that a 4^th night will be covered by a local church.  More on this in a later post.

Volunteer recruitment for both the drop-in and overnight shelter has already started.  This year we will be making some changes to the way teams operate in order to overcome some of the issues we experience last winter.

To begin with, there will now be 10 teams:

• A set-up team that will get the GMC venue ready for each evening session (4:30-6:00pm)
• 3 evening teams: one for Tuesday, one for Thursday and one for Sunday evening (6:00pm – 10:30pm)
• 3 winter shelter overnight teams: one for Tuesday, one for Thursday and one for Sunday evening (10:10pm – 7:00am the following day)
• 3 winter shelter breakfast teams: one for Wednesday, one for Friday and one for Monday mornings (6:45am – 8:30am)

Each team will have a limit on the number of people that can belong to it, that way ensuring members of the team will be on rota for at least 2 sessions each month.

If people want to do more sessions then they can:

• Volunteer to be on more than one team
• Ask to go on the ‘emergency’ list – these are people who don’t mind volunteering at very short notice
• Responding to the weekly emails where we are trying to fill gaps in the rota.

Over the next few months we will be contacting existing volunteers to see which team(s) they want to belong to.  Once a team is ‘full’ we will close off the recruitment to that team.

Potential new volunteers can also apply online by selecting this link.