Volunteers will sleep rough at a Bristol landmark this week to support some of the city’s most vulnerable women. People are being invited to ‘swap comfort for concrete’ for the sleep-out to raise funds for One 25.
The charity supports some of the most marginalised women in Bristol, with a lot of their worked centred around those involved in street sex work. This Friday (October 13) supporters will be taking to the streets to raise money and awareness to help women who have no safe place to call home.
One25, which has been forced to cut back on some of their services in the last year due to a loss in funding, often works as a linking service, supporting women to access a range of services to meet their individual needs. In the last year the charity has seen a 47 per cent increase in the number of women accessing support through their outreach van.
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Lily Mcgroarty is a mental health worker who previously volunteered for the charity. She will be among those sleeping outside this Friday evening.
The 33-year-old said: “I think women’s services can be overlooked and One25 support the most vulnerable women who are often left out of official statistics. What I learnt from volunteering with the charity is that we need more services like One25; we need safe spaces where people who are able to access warm food, washing and access to recourses.
“I’m not nervous about sleeping outside because I know I am safe. I have slept rough before but it was when I was young and travelling and ran out of money and I do remember how cold, desperate and fearful it felt.”
Anyone can participate in the sleep-out as long as they are over 18 or over 14 and with a parent or guardian. All volunteers will meet at St Stephen’s Church in the Old City at 10pm with their own choice of bedding, and remain there until 8am the following morning.
The women One25 works with have often experienced abuse and trauma and may suffer with poor mental health – homelessness is just one of the issues faced by women who access the service. With a safe home being central to a person’s wellbeing, the charity alongside inHope and Bristol Soup Run Trust decided that raising money through a sleep-out would also help draw attention to the reality of sleeping out in the cold.
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Amy Sutcliffe, the communications manager at the St Pauls-based charity, will also be sleeping out in the cold for one night this Friday. She said when she participated in the event previously it helped her appreciate the importance of a warm home and gave her a small glimpse into the challenge of sleeping outside.
She said: “Homelessness is one of the challenges but for the women we work with it can also be about support with drug addiction or helping them escape a violent partner. We work as a linking service to build trust and understand the help they need and provide that help.
“Homelessness is a huge factor and every woman does deserve to have a home that she feels safe in and sadly that is not the case and we just want to help shine a light on that and take a very active step by raising money on Friday we are enabling services to continue.
“We particularly work with women who are street sex working out at night. For those women it really is the case that they have run out of options and they have nowhere else to turn.
“We had to reduce our services this year and we were very sad about that because they were services that were very much needed by the women we work with, but we didn’t have the funding in place to support everything that we were doing so we had to look at all the different support that we were providing. We then decided that it was the night outreach work with women on the streets that was the most critical and alongside that was our case workers who support women to access services.”
The sleep-out event will be taking place on Friday, October 13 at St Stephen’s Church from 10pm to 8am. You can sign up by clicking on the link here. You can also sponsor the sleep-out here.
