Camrose Centre For Homeless And Vulnerably Housed People

We are so happy to report that our freezer is now full! 😍 Thank you very much to everyone that has donated and spead the word 🙏. As we are lucky enough to have teams of volunteers from PepsiCo supplying and cooking our lunches on Thursdays for the next few weeks we are unlikely to need anymore items for our freezer for a month or so. Please do still support us with items for our food parcels, pot noodles, snack biscuits, crisps and small cartons of drinks. Thank you all once again 🥰

Dear Supporters - Many thanks for all your recent donations, which are much appreciated. We still have requirements for certain food items to go into the rough sleeper food packs, which we make up to hand out at each session. At the moment we greatly need ring pull cans of baked beans, spaghetti, meatballs, stew, curry etc, but no soups at the moment. We also are running low on dried noodles - ie Pot Noodles, mugshots and super noodles. Multipacks of chocolate biscuit bars, (...as an example penguins, club biscuits) would be greatly appreciated too.
For our chef's cupboard we would like tinned carrots, mixed vegetables and tinned potatoes. We also would be very grateful to receive some nice biscuits to put out on the tables in the halll....I am not cheeky enough to ask for something out of Harrods Food Hall or Fortnum and Masons, but just something interesting to accompany our clients teas and coffees !
From as clothing point of view, we are always grateful to receive men's trainers (sizes 7 - 10) , jogging bottoms in smaller sizes, jeans size 32 & size 34, large teeshirts, large hoodies .
Thanking you very much for your continued support of such a very worthwhile cause.
Sally (Volunteer)
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Vacancy for a Part-Time Support Worker The Camrose Centre wishes to recruit a second part-time Support Worker to work with the existing lively and friendly team of the Centre Manager, the existing Support Worker and a pool of volunteers. The hours of work will be 12 hours a week, normally in two sessions of six hours between 0900 and 1500 on Tuesdays or Thursdays or a five-hour session between 0900 and 1300 on Fridays, with the remaining hour completed by mutual agreement dur...ing the week. Closing dates for applications is Friday 31st May. Interviews will be conducted on Wednesday 19th June with the successful candidate being advised on Friday 21st June. Start date will be Tuesday 16th July. The term of employment will be for 12 months. Requests for further information including an application form by e-mail only to Camrose@BVAction.org.uk will be answered on or after 14th May. Private messages and posts on Facebook about this vacancy will not be answered.
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Dear Supporters, we have an urgent need for fresh/frozen meat to enable us to feed our hungry clients. Our freezer is now empty 😟 We find mince of any kind, sausages, sausage meat, chicken goes down well. We would be grateful for anything but enough to feed 25 in one sitting is ideal 🙏

Dear Supporters, my name is Sally and I am a volunteer at Camrose. I get involved with clothing our clients and making up rough sleeper food packs which they can take away when they leave at the end of the session. Due to your wonderful support, we have an amazing amount of non perishable food items, but there are a few gaps in the items that we tend to provide:
Ring pull cans of beans, spaghetti etc. We have plenty of soup though ! Pot Noodles, Super Noodles, Mugshots Bottl...ed Water Please note that we don't need crisps at the moment, which makes a change !
From a clothing point of view, we can never get enough: Men's 32" jeans, joggers in the smaller sizes Men's Large Teeshirts Men's trainers sizes 8-10 For a change we actually do have sufficient supplies of socks and boxers ! Ladies briefs, small sizes ( XS, S)- Primark have a load marked down at the moment (Hint Hint !) Ladies socks Ladies clothing, size 8/10, younger/fashionable styles
I am sorry to sound a bit picky, but as you are aware, we have such limited storage space. Plus, when I hand out clothing, my aim is to make sure that our clients don't look like typical homeless people (if there is such a thing !) We have been given some really lovely items of clothing by you in the past and it is greatly appreciated by the volunteers and the clients alike. Thank you for reading this.May you have a lovely day :-)
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More about the Camrose Centre in 2018: Helping men and women to avoid, survive and recover from homelessness is all about encouraging them to make life-changing choices and to maintain better relationships with those around them. With the help of the Council Housing Team, Julian House Outreach Workers, First Point Floating Point Services, Citizen’s Advice, the Night Shelter Team, NHS drug and alcohol abuse and mental health services and so many others from the Basingstoke Soc...ial Inclusion Partnership, the vast majority of Camrose’s clients have been able to change their lives for the better. But this is not the whole story. In that same year, five clients of Camrose, men and women, who the Centre has known in some cases for many years, lost their lives prematurely because of life-changing choices they made. Their choices to abuse alcohol, drugs and/or their own physical health accumulated to take their lives decades earlier than would be expected. This has caused great sadness to their families, friends and among those who have tried to help them. And it is such people that Camrose continues to strive to help.
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Dear supporters, many of you ask regularly if we need donations so below is a list of our latest needs. Thank you all so much for your kindness and generousity.
Fresh/frozen mince/chicken and sausage MEAT to feed 25. Long life milk Onions... Men’s regular boxers Coffee Sugar Cereal (not oats) Tinned custard Plastic carrier bags suitable for food parcels.
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A huge thank you to Jason Elton from Sainsbury’s Kempshot for this huge haul of clothes, and bags for our food parcels to the Camrose Centre, we appreciate your continued support 🙏🏻😊

A look at the Camrose Centre in 2018: The Camrose Centre for Homeless and Vulnerably Housed People has enjoyed a successful 2018 thanks to the immense support provided by the people of the borough of Basingstoke and Deane. In the course of the year the Centre opened for 155 sessions, that is every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday except Christmas Day (when the Night Shelter stayed open for 38 continuous hours). In total 315 clients were welcomed, of whom 123 were new and 192 returning old friends. Around 28-32 people attended each session of whom 8-12 presented as rough sleepers. Tribute must be paid to the Centre’s staff, the pool of around 9 male and 14 female client-facing volunteers and all our supporters, including a very patient landlord, without whom the Camrose Centre could not operate. Thank you!

Hi, The Camrose Centre is delighted to announce a joint initiative with the Basingstoke Time Bank and sponsored by the Social Inclusion Partnership's Real Change Basingstoke Real Change Basingstokecampaign to raise £11,024 by the end of July 2019, to help socially excluded people in our borough. More information and on line giving is available at: https://thegoodexchange.com/…/real-chan ge-for-basingstoke-2…. Camrose fully supports this campaign but if you wish to support Camrose solely, please use our Local Giving account or contact the Centre through this page. Thank you!

Dear Camrose supporters. Today in Camrose was ‘business as usual’, we opened our doors to 28 clients, all welcome to a self service breakfast, served 23 lunches, our wet room was in full use, with wash kits and clean towels provided, we gave out food parcels, clothes and advice, accepted plenty of donations all of which needed to be sorted and put away. None of this would be possible without the team of two staff and 7 volunteers who all manned the service today. Thank you all 🙏🏻

It is with huge regret that Camrose is unable to open today, this is due to unavoidable circumstances leaving us short staffed. We pride ourselves on opening every session (excluding Christmas Day) over the last year and beyond. Please note that we have already started the process of putting measures in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again in future. Thank you for your understanding.

Interesting reading.
https://www.theguardian.com/…/homeless- people-rough-sleepers

Hello to our wonderful supporters. The centre has ramped up a gear due to the night shelter having now closed until December. This means we are giving out more food parcels, breakfast and hot lunches, we are in need of more items to help us provide these things. We need Pot noodles, mugshots,super noodles, peperami sticks (on offer at Lidl atm) cup-a-soups (no tins please) bars of chocolate and chocolate biscuits, all these for our food parcels. To help toward our breakfast and lunches we need cereal, coffee, sugar, chicken and minced beef (frozen or for freezing). Thank you to each and every one of you for your continued support X