I've raised £1000 to crowdfund a Hot Bottle Network for keeping London's homeless community warm during the winter.
Organised by Chen & Kelvin
Story
Latest Updates as of 30th Dec 2020:
To those of you who have donated to our hot bottle network charity cause, we would like to inform you that due to continuously challenging Tier 4 restrictions currently enforced in London (and now a national lockdown! ), we have decided to make better use of the donations for the homeless community by donating the funds to help the ongoing charity cause set up by the Under One Sky Collective (https://www.underonesky.cc/).
The Collective is an emerging non-profit & voluntary organisation that has served over 40,000 homeless people of London since 2012. It caught our attention to commit towards their mission as it stands out as a volunteers-led movement with no regular staff costs, unlike big charities that pay significant amount of wages which kind of stifles the whole idea of charity organisations. Therefore, please be rest assured that your attentive donations will be put into safe & good hands with this organisation in terms of distributing support packages with food, clothes, toiletries, sleeping bags, gift cards, books, and messages of hope & light, to people living through very dark times. Once again, thank you so much for helping us in championing a good cause for the society! :)
Why do we come up with this idea?
Hi there! We are two Malaysian born engineering professionals currently residing in London, UK. One of the key social welfare issues we kept seeing in London is the monumental amount of homeless/rough-sleeping problems on the streets of London.
With the current Covid-19 pandemic raging in the UK, this could potentially lead to even more people sleeping rough. A quick breakdown of statistics taken from the Atlas of London's Homelessness Services shows that there are already over 2700 rough sleepers for just the Borough of Westminster this year, a dramatic increase of 27% from the year 2018.
The Greater London Authority (GLA) also reported a total number of 10,726 (taken from Greater London Bulletin 2019/20) rough sleepers in the entire London during 2019/20 period, undoubtedly a number which is a huge concern.
We believe one of the easiest ways we could do is to keep homeless folks warm on the streets throughout the winter as we anticipate many volunteering hostels & shelters may struggle with sufficient allocation of bed spaces due to disruption caused by Covid-19 pandemic, for instance:
London is a very costly city to live in. The record number of job losses due to Covid-19 pandemic will put additional strains on those struggling with poverty and thus more homeless/rough sleepers on the streets of London this winter.
Potentially reduced bed spaces for the homeless community due to government-induced safety measures & assessment guidelines sanctioned to hostel/shelter providers.
Reduced resources & assistances from local council & charity organisations due to Covid-19 working-from-home measures.
Why the hot water bottle?
A hot water bottle is a simple household appliance where some of us use to keep our body & feet warm, relax and ease aches/pains at home during winter. This is great to help the homeless people to keep themselves warm, especially the most vulnerable ones who would struggle to find shelter during this winter due to Covid-19 pandemic disruptions.
How will we do it, and how will the crowdfunded money be used?
The money will be used to bulk order hot water bottles from local businesses to get a fair price with good safety/quality. The hot water bottle needs to be certified to BS1970 standards as there are plenty of poor quality hot water bottles which could cause scalding. The average price of a hot water bottle is approximately £2.25 - £2.50 per piece.
We will be focusing on distributing hot water bottles to the majority of homeless folks based in Westminster Borough via the management team at various charity hostels & temporary accommodations during the winter, as listed in Atlas of London's Homelessness Services. We also plan to identify locations where hot water refills are available and include information on a small paper tag with the hot water bottle for them in case they need ideas of places to access hot water.
In case if we get more donations than required, we hope to support other hot water bottle network groups around the UK by donating extra hot water bottles to them. There have been a considerable amount of initiatives started up in the UK, such as Brighton, Manchester, Bristol, Nottingham & etc.
Before you go...
The fight against Covid-19 within the homeless community is undoubtedly a massive humanitarian effort and one that we must all work together on. It cannot be resolved overnight, but we hope that this simple initiative can help alleviate the suffering & complications for those who really need help this winter.
If you are interested in helping us further in championing the cause, this is what you can do:
i. Spread the news of our JustGiving initiative to your immediate friends, family or colleagues who might be interested in funding this cause, or even better, any social media influencers or local community leaders alike!
ii. Help us identify local hotspots of homeless people in London. Drop us an email to hotwaterbottlenetworklondon@gmail.com if you have ideas of the areas where the homeless/rough sleepers could use some help from the donation of hot water bottles!
iii. In case if you do not feel ready to donate to our cause, that's okay! What you can help instead is to make use of this website called StreetLink London to send an alert to the StreetLink management team. This will help connect the homeless individual to additional support from local services support.
Finally, Thank You very much for your attention to our initiative!
