Sunday 4 October 2009

Broadening our understanding of our community

We had a great meeting yesterday at St Georges - almost a full-house, and the Trustees are really grateful to our wonderful Area Supervisors for their commitment to BCS. The meeting discussed some big issues, namely: the extra services and space we would have this Christmas, including Samaritans, Citizens Advice, Housing Advice, Library Services and IT skills; the provision of clothing at the Shelter for our guests; and the impact of the recession on our numbers this year - we need to enter into discussion with our friends around Birmingham to see the impact on their services this year.

We also had a great discussion with Philippe from Phoenix Futures about drugs awareness and the impact of classified and declassified drugs on our guests. Given that drug dependency, from alcohol and nicotine, to heroin, crack cocaine and methadone does impact our guests this was a critical session. Philippe handled our individual and collective (mis)conceptions really well, and enabled us to engage with the related psychological and mental health issues.

It will be interesting to see how this affects our behaviours over Christmas and our ability to relate to our guests.

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