20.03.2020
Hello from Ashford Place:
What a week. I am not going to say anything about unprecedented times or pandemic or anything else apart from stay healthy, stay safe and wash your hands, often!
As you can imagine our world has been turned upside down. From welcoming our clients and visitors every week the place is now closed – apart from our homeless people still being with us – and all our energies are focused on keeping in contact with our existing clients and offering them a mixture of regular phone/email/txt contact as well as, increasingly food drops and sorting out things like a lack of money, suddenly out of work and much more. There is an air of desperation creeping in quickly though so that’s keeping us all busy even if we are working from home. Una phoned this week to say she is very lonely and misses her weekly outing to us but that her family are helping out whenever they can, John, 68 and living on his own has just lost his job and has very little money and doesn’t know how he is going to cope, and Michael also laid of this week and wants to know how he can get benefits. We expect to see a lot more of this in the next few weeks/months.
Positives:
We have had so many offers from our Brent and Barnet residents and Councils offering to help where they can, our funders are going out of their way to express their support and offer any other resources they can – we have funders and our volunteers buying cards and putting together small presents for us to send to our clients – it might be small but our clients knowing that they are not forgotten is very valuable to them. Felix and Fareshare have, as you would expect been brilliant at delivering us food and supplies. Our local Resident Associations, faith communities, Councillors and other groups are completely committed to work together for each other and we appreciate their support.
Some of the team earlier in the week attempting to use our web-based video conferencing platform that will allow us to have meetings and catch up on line. Happy to say we are all experts now!
