Last week, YOU marked Poverty and Homelessness Action Week in Basingstoke in a slightly unusual way!  Raising awareness of issues around homelessness, tackling prejudice, challenging discrimination and looking at innovative and forward-thinking solutions to tackling poverty is what YOU is all about. 

Part of that challenge is letting the people we work with know exactly what it is that we do … we have some staff and services who work with particular groups and people but they may only know that person, the team or the service.  Often, they may not be aware of the other services that we offer even if we work in a ‘joined up way’ amongst ourselves.

In Basingstoke, we have a range of fabulous services that really make a difference,  Basingstoke First Point is our floating support service for people who are homeless or threatened with homelessness, May Place House is a direct access hostel, Penn House is part of our young person’s services and then we have SAiL (homelessness support service), our county-wide Supported Employment Service for people with a learning disability and the award-winning Smart Living assistive technology service.

To raise awareness during Poverty & Homelessness Action Week our staff thought it would be a great idea to visit all the teams and individuals we work with in Basingstoke.  We baked several trays of cupcakes (decorated with an icing version of our logo!) and armed ourselves with ‘thank you cards’ to thank everyone for the support they’ve given us over the last year.  The cards carried our names, contact details and information about the services.

The cakes went down very well … and very quickly!  People loved them and it was a great way for us to take 5 minutes to say thank you to the teams, people and organisations we work with every day around the city.  So … not only were we able to say thank you to some of the hard working Basingstoke professionals we work with every day, but we were also able to raise awareness of what we do and pass on our contact details and names.