WHO WE ARE

We are a small charity based in Stoke Newington. We provide free meals twice a week for anyone who needs it. We also have a hairdresser, a community garden and regular visits from health professionals and addiction workers. We try to provide a sense of community for people who often struggle with social isolation.

WHAT WE'RE DOING AT THE MOMENT

Instead of our usual services, we're currently providing take-away meals twice a week from St Paul's West Hackney. Everyone receives a hot meal and small assortment of snacks, kindly donated by volunteers, local people and businesses. All precautions to protect our service-users are being taken, so we're hoping to be able to continue until the end of the crisis.

As it is becoming increasingly difficult for our service users to access food, we're seeing a regular increase in the number of meals served per session. At the moment, we are serving about 150 meals a week. We're trying to reduce the number of attendees by delivering some of the meals.

Many of our service users are feeling more isolated than ever; as a means to tackle this issue, NLAH has offered to collect phone numbers and check-in with guests via phone on a weekly basis.

Although rough sleepers are being offered hotel rooms, we're finding a lot of them are struggling to get referred. For complex reasons, others are not willing to be housed. With all libraries, drop-in centres, cafés closed, many on the streets are finding it very hard to charge their phones. We're hoping to offer them portable charging packs so they can keep using their phones, and possibly be found by outreach services.

We're having to constantly adapt to the ever-changing crisis. This emergency fund will be used to support those within the North London Action for the Homeless community who are being directly impacted by the wider effects of this pandemic, and who will be struggling to meet their basic needs. It will cover the extra cost of our take-away service (take-away containers, fruits etc) and the cost of new needs for our service users (charging packs, etc).

For the marginalised people we support this crisis has added stress to what were already very challenging living circumstances. Any donations made will be greatly received.