Lancaster District Community & Voluntary Solutions: ​Donations can help make a long term difference

You may have heard of organisations like Calico, Let’s BeFriends, Acorn and others who work alongside Lancaster City Council to help rough sleepers through housing support, drug or alcohol addiction treatment, and social activities.

Street Aid enhances their work by providing an opportunity for people to benefit from items which help them feel at home in their accommodation and build a new life. Over the last two years, generous donations have paid for training courses to help people get back to their former jobs, travel passes, replacement identification documents, and household essentials such as bedding, carpets, microwaves, crockery and cutlery.

These are things that most would agree are essential for creating normal living conditions, but other support schemes don’t usually provide them. As one man who benefitted from a Street Aid grant told us, “sometimes people fall on hard times and to have this service helps people feel normal.”

Giving money on the street might be a temporary solution to hunger for an individual, or it might go towards maintaining addictions, even among people who are already being supported into treatment.

Street Aid is different because requests for money are made by staff at local support agencies, who are best placed to know what each person they work with most needs. Their organisation receives and spends the grant on the specified item themselves – so Street Aid donors can be sure the money will be spent on something that can make a real and long-term difference.

With fewer people carrying cash, we’ve made it easy to donate to Street Aid in other ways. You can give £3 with a tap of your phone or card at donation points in the windows of:

Dalton Square Pharmacy

Citizen’s Advice North Lancashire (George Street, Lancaster and Queen Street, Morecambe)

Morecambe Festival Market

Treasure Island (Marine Road Central)

Alternatively, you can give £3 from anywhere in an instant by texting STREET to 70450 (text costs £3 plus one standard rate network message), or larger amounts at totalgiving.co.uk/appeal/streetaid

To find out more about how Street Aid works, and how it helps people turn their lives around, visit lancastercvs.org.uk/streetaid