What’s the vision?
A city where no-one needs to sleep rough or beg.

What’s the situation?
The hostels in Southampton are full and last winter an average of 30 people slept rough each night. The Winter Night Shelter Scheme is part of the wider Street Support partnership approach to tackling the growing challenge of rough sleeping and contributing towards the vision. It’s a practical outworking of God’s love.

What’s the plan?
A group of churches across the centre of Southampton will open their buildings on a rotation over 4 weeks in January/February, hosting 12 homeless guests for the night.

St Denys Church will be doing this on 4 Sunday nights: 12th, 19th, 26th January and 2nd February. They will be providing a hot meal, a chance to chat, a bed for the night and breakfast: warm hospitality.

What do we need?
• 12-14 people to volunteer for each Sunday night doing one of the three shifts: 6.30-10pm, 9.45pm–6.45am or 6.30-8.30am; NB we particularly need men for the overnight shift and people willing to be shift leaders
• £450 to cover the cost of food, fuel and other small costs
• Possibly bedding for 12 beds (but not the beds themselves)
• A small Support Team to transport beds, do the laundry & the food shopping each week
• Lots of prayer supporters

I’m interested… what should I do?
• Take a look at the volunteer role description
• Ask a couple of people to be willing to be your references (ideally not clergy from the host church)
• Request an application form from St Denys and return it completed asap.
• Expect to receive some information about training and the rota in early December
• Get excited!

What help & support is there for us?
• The Winter Shelter Team provides support, advice and the framework that we operate within
• The Society of St James (SSJ) provides the volunteer training and an Operational Safety Team
• The Southampton City Council Homeless Prevention Team and SSJ will assess guests and allocate access to the shelter