NORTHAMPTON HOPE CENTRE
This organization has already been registered
Someone in your organization has already registered and setup an account. would you like to join their team?Profile owner : d***n@n*******************e.o*g.uk
Mission Statement
The Hope Centre Northampton focuses on relieving poverty and tackling the causes of homelessness in Northampton by giving people a hand up, not just a hand out. Whether through our Hand Up service which provides hot meals, basic facilities and one to one support, our Learning for Living program giving education and training whilst supporting the individuals physical and mental health or our Food Club which provides food at subsided cost to those suffering from chronic poverty, we look to fill the gaps in the Northampton safety net and help those left behind back to their feet
About This Cause
DURING COVID-19 Hope has continued to support those who are the most vulnerable in society; The homeless and the hungry in Northampton. Along with the Northampton homelessness team, we secured hotel accommodation for the 91 homeless in Northampton and continue to support them each day with food, clothing and toiletries. We are completing daily welfare checks to ensure the physical and mental well-being of all of those in hotels and also our clients who are currently living in the community. We have established a mental health support line manned by a trained mental health professional and have launched online support resources to help those who are feeling emotionally isolated during this difficult time. Our Food club continues to support those who are hungry in Northampton and has moved from providing 30-40 food parcels a week to over 140. We are developing our services every day in response to need and need support for this to continue. --- Hope tackles poverty, is concerned with poverty, cares about and hates poverty. Everything we do is structured around tackling poverty. Much of our focus is with the most explicit form of destitution – homelessness – and its accompaniments: drugs, alcohol, mental health – but increasingly we focus on wider poverty, especially food poverty, amongst a broader group of people. We help practically – providing access to cheap food and clothes - and in our day centre, some basic services like washing facilities, haircuts, care for dogs, footcare etc. We keep people alive and give them dignity. Food is especially key to our purpose. We recognise that simply giving people something to survive that day is not enough. We are committed to challenging and addressing the causes of their poverty. Some of those causes are from problems the person has – drugs, mental health, drink etc - and we help the person get control over those things and improve confidence and self-esteem. But we do not believe that the source of poverty for these people, or for all the other people in wider society, is always some sort of deficit or weakness that they as individuals ‘suffer’ from. Most of the people we deal with are poor because the economic and social system has put them in this place, not because of their own behaviour. Their current behaviour is the result of the poor hand life gave them: poor parenting, education, lack of jobs, too little housing, too high costs for housing and its poor quality, and poor employment opportunities. Whilst many of our clients need some therapeutic help overcoming their personal problems, they don’t always. Many of them just need opportunities, fair treatment, and sensible offers of help. We find these for people. We work to find solutions to the problems people have: we specialise in providing training and support to get skills and jobs. Others offer specialist help with drink or drug treatment, mental health or housing, which we refer people to. We specialise in helping people support themselves through work and to achieve employability. We know that for many people, low wages means work is not always the complete answer, but working brings all sorts of other benefits for health, confidence and wellbeing. We also work to support communities. Our new food club is clear that it is not a foodbank. It’s a commercial transaction where money is paid for food and the money raised channelled back into more services. It’s about building and growing community resources and assets, keeping poor people’s money to do good in that community rather than seeing those assets stripped and sent into other people’s hands. Our model of social enterprise is focused on helping build wealth amongst poor people, raising money from poor people for use in improving their community – its money they would have spent on food and clothes anyhow. We could sell nice stuff to middle class people, but most of what we sell is food and clothes for people on low incomes. Its social enterprise run and for poor people, selling things poor people need. We also work to challenge and resist poverty. Not for any political party; we don’t believe any one party has the monopoly on solutions. We are concerned with seeing whoever governs takes note of poverty and inequality and addresses it. We campaign on reducing poverty, making people aware of inequality in society and what this means for people. We will only take funding from organisations that have a commitment to CSR. We walk the talk by paying fair wages to staff. We care about the environment and we are a recycling charity, restoring old tools, and using food or clothes that would otherwise go to landfill.