Lyke Wake Walk for BCS

On Saturday 20 June 2009, Richard Hall [BCS Trustee] and Steve Chaplin [mountain goat] will be attempting the Lyke Wake Walk across 40-ish miles of the North York Moors from Osmotherley to the sea at Ravenscar. The walk has to be completed within 24 hours and will most likely require a 4am start at Osmotherley. Oh dear.

The route is liable to be extremely boggy and in the event of more extreme weather we'll probably defer the walk until the Sunday or Monday. However, the walk will be done!!

In order to make this apparent 15-hours of lunacy more worthwhile, we intend to walk the walk to raise funds for Birmingham Christmas Shelter, in particular to pay for Christmas gift bags for our guests and for provisions for this year's Christmas lunch.

So if you would like to sponsor us that would be wonderful. To do so, please:

1. click through to the Birmingham Christmas Shelter secure on-line account;
2. click on the make payment link; and
   
3. in the "donation details" page, please use the text-box "Please pass the following instructions to the charity" to type that your donation is for our "Lyke Wake walk". This means that we will be able to track how much is raised by Steve and Richard.
   
   Please also leave a comment here for us, under this blog entry, with any advice, guidance, messages of support, and a note of how much you have sponsored us for [so we can keep a tally]. Simply click on the "comment" link to the right of where it states "Posted by Richard Hall".
   
   We will make a BCS YouTube video of the walk - so if you want to see me having a beer at The Lion at Blakey Ridge [around noon on Saturday], or crawling to the sea at Ravenscar [around 10pm on Saturday], you'll have to wait for that video.
   
   Thanks for reading and for your on-going support for Birmingham Christmas Shelter. This walk is part of our fundraising committee's attempts to enhance what we do for our guests at Christmas. Your support is invaluable and hugely appreciated.

Next BCS Volunteer Get-Together

Our very own dynamic Area Supervisor, DJ Phil, has been busy testing all the bars, clubs and restaurants in Birmingham city centre and has decided that 'The Green Room' cafe-bar is worthy of our patronage for the next BCS Volunteer get-together. It is in the Arcadian centre, close to where we first met in January and February and is directly opposite the Hippodrome Theatre.

We will be there from 17:00hrs on Sunday 10th May '09 and all BCS Volunteers are welcome. As always, no need to confirm, just turn-up, with or without friends and/or family - all are welcome. In the meantime, please give a little thought to what you would like us to organise for forthcoming evenings - salsa dancing is still on-the-cards, as is 'flower-arranging the DJ Phil way'.

As always, DJ Phil and Ellis P are always happy to field any questions etc..

Dave Morris rows the London Marathon for BCS

On April 26^th at 10:00am, when the London Marathon starts, our friend and Birmingham Christmas Shelter donor Dave Morris will start rowing on a Concept2 indoor rowing machine at the Virgin Active gym in Solihull. He is aiming to complete the full 26 mile distance (or 42195 meters for the Europeans among us) in under 3 and a half hours.

He has been training for over 20 weeks and has covered over 800,000 meters in training including several half marathons and one row of 20 miles. He is carrying an injured arm ("my own" says Dave) which will need surgery 10 days after the event!

Funds raised will be split as follows; 50% BCS, 25% Welsh Air Ambulance, 25% Cancer Research.

All pledges of donations should be emailed to Dave at Morris301@btinternet.com

Crisis planning £2.5m centre for Birmingham homeless

Mike, Jamie and Ali attended a reception hosted by Crisis and SIFA fireside on 12 March at the Rep. The two organisations were flagging the fact that Crisis is planning a £2.5m centre for Birmingham's homeless and this is due to open in 18 months.

As far as we are aware there is no plan to open a Christmas Shelter and so our work will continue. However, we do plan to monitor this situation and to work more closely with partner organisations in Birmingham. At the very least we hope that we can engage our guests with more skills and outreach-related developments, as appropriate.

Birmingham Christmas Shelter on Twitter

It's nice to see Birmingham Christmas Shelter now on Twitter. Follow us at BrumXmasShelter. We'll use this to publicise our plans and the shelter during 2009.

BCS, SIFA Fireside and Crisis

The Trustees of Birmingham Christmas Shelter have been invited to a reception about a proposed partnership between SIFA Fireside and Crisis, under the banner of Skylight Birmingham. We hope that the reception will lead to a dialogue about the provision of homeless services, year-round, in Birmingham.

One of our main aims for 2009 is to extend our co-operation and engagement with outreach organisations, in order to offer better experiences for our guests at Christmas, and also to engage the vast expertise of our networks of volunteers. We believe that through partnerships with local and national organisations, like SIFA Fireside and Crisis, we can capitalise on the community spirit of our volunteers and guests and do better things.

We'll let you know how we get on.

Recycling at Christmas

Over the years a target for BCS has been to reduce the amount of waste that we produce during Christmas week. Ted, our top recycler, speaks about this in our first YouTube video.

This year we used one medium skip, and managed to recycle:

1. 30 bundles of paper/card;
2. 10 bags of cleaned and crushed metals;
3. 10 bas of plastics [it is frustrating that many plastics, especially those that are black, are not accepted];
4. 3 bags of glass;
5. 1 bag of crushed foil; and
   
6. 4 bags of compostables.

As ever, tetrapacks caused Ted some distress as they cannot be recycled. Maybe next year, huh?