Sizing Up The Coat-petition

On a beautiful balmy Barnsley evening Kirsty and James set off from Glasshouse to Hope House. Peter wasn't meeting us until later in the evening as he was otherwise occupied in a board meeting. We had received prior instruction on what was needed from us though, we were to sort through a huge pile of donated coats, separating them into mens and womens categories and then into sizes. We arranged plastic crates along the floor in two rows, one for womens and one for mens. Along each row we the crates were ordered in order of size of the clothing to be stored within. For the mens this consisted of crates ranging from XS up to 3XL, and for womens from size 8 to size 22.

Flask Force

After the sorting shenanigans, we prepared sandwiches and a flask of hot chocolate for taking out on our homeless search around town. Towards the end of this we were joined by Peter, who suggested places where we could search. Even if we didn't find anyone at the camp locations in the early evening, we could report our findings back to the team for them to check out places (or not) later on their evening rounds. We filled our rucksacks and set off on our route.

Our first location to check was around St Mary's church. Here there are reported to be people sleeping in the entrance archway. Whilst we didn't find anyone there, there was evidence of people staying in the area in the form of lots of rubbish and clothing in the drainage channels either side of the doorway. We did a lap of the church perimeter to make sure there was nobody hanging around, each setting off in a different direction and meeting up on the other side. We didn't find anyone.

We checked the train station, by way of the high street, and a known sleeping location outside The White Bear on Royal St. Again we didn't find anyone. It must have been too early! Soon Peter should have a new distribution center to act as a hub for distribution of items for homeless people to actively attend of an evening, like the old place at Temperance House used to be.

Our designated locations checked, we headed back to Hope House. Here we did some tricep dips to add some upper body work into our evening's activities. Whilst there we were joined by Jack, Joanne and Peter, who were loading up ready to head out to visit the homeless.

We then headed back to Glasshouse where we stretched off and heard announcements.