Pair with lotta bottle to help the homeless
MIXED REACTION TO PLAN FOR COMFORT IN TREES
THIS Meadows mum wants to hang hot water bottles from trees around the city to keep homeless people warm this winter.
With high numbers of rough sleepers continuing to sleep on our streets and temperatures set to fall, Nic Reed and her friend Dawn Desforges have an unusual suggestion.
They want to collect water bottles so that they can tie them to trees in the city centre with laminated cards saying where they can be refilled.
Homeless people could then pick them up and take them to a designated point to fill them with hot water.
It’s early days for the group and so there are a few details to work out, such as which trees they would use and where the homeless would go to fill up. But similar projects have proved a hit in other cities such as Bristol.
Miss Reed, a 43-year-old mum-of-two, said: “We were just really, really aware of how many more homeless there are at the moment. You never know how life is going to end up. We’re putting a little bit of help in. There are homeless people who do not want to go to shelter and at least we can give them something to keep them warm.
“It doesn’t solve the problem but it’s a bit of comfort.”
When she was younger she used to regularly chat and share a smoke with one rough sleeper on her way home from a night out, and this inspired her to do more than just “give money and forget about it”.
The number of homeless people sleeping on the city’s streets in August each night was as high as 49. Recent figures show Nottingham has experienced a huge increase in rough sleeping since 2010, rising from three on a typical autumn night to 43 in 2017.
There are now expanded emergency measures to cope, including the winter shelter, which opened two nights ago and will run until April, with hundreds of people expected to use it.
Toby Neal, head of the city’s community protection service, said that technically, putting the bottles on trees would be littering but they would be unlikely to pursue it.
“I get that people are concerned but there are other ways of helping out,” he said.
“I would encourage them to talk to street outreach, Emmanuel House or Framework, who could really do with the help.
“Hanging up hot water bottles does seem a bit silly to me.”
Emmanuel House, a homelessness charity which runs the winter shelter, said that it was better for people to engage with them than short-term solutions.
Denis Tully, the charity’s chief executive, said: “The preference would be for people to go in to services where they have access to a safe warm bed.
“If someone is choosing not to engage in services when a real option is offered, then the alternative is actually to sustain people in their homelessness.
“That goes against our intuition of wanting to help people but, especially at this time of year, there are a variety of options for people. “But it is good that people are thinking about homelessness. The help of the public is very important.”
However, the founder of soup kitchen Nottingham Street Knights, while agreeing that getting people indoors was the best, said that wasn’t possible for everyone – particularly those barred from the shelter.
These hot-water bottles could help those people and he is planning on using the organisation’s food stall as a collection point and somewhere the homeless could go to get hot water. The 23-year-old said: “I think it’s an absolutely brilliant idea because there are people who can’t access the shelter.
“Anything to help keep that warmth when it does drop – it makes all that difference in terms of comfort.”
To get involved, see the online version of this story at nottinghampost.com .