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September has flown by as fast as the weather has changed and as we head towards World Homeless Day, we cannot leave September behind without saying a huge Thank You to everyone that has organised a Harvest event and donated items and money to us over the past month. Our Harvest campaign is continuing to run until the end of October, so if you are still thinking about running a fundraising activity, there’s still time and there are ideas available on our website.
World Homeless Day is one of the biggest days of the year in our calendar at Catching Lives and a time for us to make sure everyone in the city knows who we are and what we do. Last year, you may have seen our tents on Rheims Way, displaying statistics regarding homelessness. We have updated these for 2021 and will be displaying them again along Rheims Way in the days running up to World Homeless Day. We’ll be in the City Centre on 9th October so please come and say hello to us and you should also see some of our ‘Scan to donate’ posters up around the City Centre, in businesses and shops. If you’re a business owner and could accommodate one of our posters for World Homeless Day, please let us know so that we can bring you a poster to display, via fundraising@catchinglives.org.
One of our clients, ‘B’, recently held an exhibition with the support of Catching Lives. His installation at Touchbase Gallery in Folkestone was an immersive dip into the world of his experience of sleeping rough in the woods. The exhibition was well attended and enjoyed by all.
Quiz Night
We are hosting a Quiz night at the Catching Lives Day Centre on Friday 12th November at 7pm. It’s £8 per head with a maximum of 6 per team. Bring your own snacks & drinks. Tea/coffee/water provided. There will be limit on the number of teams so make sure to get your team together soon to avoid disappointment! To book, email terry@catchinglives.org. We can promise an evening of fun and catching up and after such a long time of having very few in-person events, it will be great to see your faces.
Catching Lives are seeking to employ a Co-ordinator and Deputy to run the Canterbury Community Shelter. This is a rolling night shelter that houses the rough sleepers of Canterbury during the winter months. It is a varied, challenging and rewarding job that involves being responsible for the set up and running of a 24 hour a day shelter operation that will run for 3 months(1st December 2021 to 28th February 2022).
The working week will require both the Coordinator and deputy to be flexible, managing and co-ordinating the shelter at each of its seven church venues from the central hub that is Canterbury Open Centre. This includes training, building and maintaining a strong team of Project Workers and volunteers, numbering 60 or more.
If you think you’re up to the challenge, take a look at our website for more details.
I recently attended an early evening meeting at Catching Lives and in the 20 minutes before it started, was enjoying the calm, quietness of the building at that time, when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a Waitrose delivery driver with several crates of fresh produce for us to use for meals for our clients. I was blown away by their generosity in not only donating these food items to us, but in bringing them directly to our door and carrying them inside. And this isn’t a one-off. This is just something Waitrose do whenever they are able. It’s so kind of them to give back to the local community and they do so quietly and unassumingly, without any desire for recognition. But with so much criticism of large corporations thrown around, I wanted to acknowledge that some are doing a lot for their local communities, from the monetary donations I mentioned in last month’s newsletter from Sainsbury’s to the regular food donations from Waitrose. We are lucky to have such kind companies wanting to help out a small, local charity such as ours.
If you have any news you would like to share with our growing list of email subscribers, from fundraising activities you have been involved with to perhaps even your reaction to our tents on Rheims Way, please do email me via sarah@catchinglives.org and I will endeavour to include some of your content in the next newsletter.
As always, thanks for reading!
