One last night of lovely comforts before we are out in the streets for the night, I hope everyone whos joining us is making the most of their warm bed tonight, because tomorrow night its cold hard floors for us. Please everyone keep your fingers crossed that this rain stays away! We will hopefully be finding somewhere dry to take shelter to sleep, but we will be soaked through by that point if the weather is like it has been today! The team has been at base tonight getting our rucksacks ready, but this time it was for us, which makes it even more real that what we are doing tomorrow night, is what our street friends do every night. As we were trying to find things that would keep us warm tomorrow night and desperately looking for the best sleeping bags and the biggest rucksacks, it really dawned on me how important it is that we are doing what we do. We arent just packing holiday bags every week, we are lacking bags that are a life line to some of the people we meet, with items in them that literally will keep them alive. Its not good enough to give someone a half packed bag in our eyes, we make sure that every bag has all of the essential items in and I realised how important that is tonight, as I was packing a bag for me, not for someone else, but for me. I dont want to spend the night on the streets of newcastle with a thin sleeping bag and no warm coat, and neither do our street friends, which is why we make sure each week that everyone has exactly what they need to keep them alive that week. It really hits home when the items you are packing into a bag are going to be what keeps YOU alive that night, our street friends lives rely on the items we give then each week, which is why this is so important to us and why we are so desperate to raise some money for our campaign, so we can go out and buy them a thick sleeping bag which will keep them warm, a large rucksack which they can carry all their worldly goods in, in this weather, its just not enough to give people the cheapest items we can find, we need to be making sure they get the warmest sleeping bags, but that comes at a price. This is what all of the funds we raise go on, buying thick sleeping bags, large flasks and large rucksacks, the difference the extra few quid in price makes to the quality of someones life is priceless. Thank you so much to everybody who came along to help tonight, I met some lovely new people that I really hope to see again, its nice when you meet new people and you just know they have the same intentions as you and you see in their eyes that they want to help, every member of our team has that desire to care for others inside them, and thats what makes us all work together so well, hopefully the new people we have met over the last few weeks will help us expand our team and enable us to help even more people together. Thank you also to everyone who brought donations along to us tonight, and a big special thank you to Sue Bulch and her husband Eddie, who brought a car load of food along tonight which had been donated by Sues work colleagues as part of a harvest festival on our behalf, our food shelf is now bursting, this will all be going into food parcels for our street friends, so thank you all so so much! If anybody else would like to do a harvest festival at their work or school, please get in touch with us. Id also like to say a big thank you to Simone Rudolphi who came along tonight with her camera and took a few shots of us doing our thing, which is fantastic because I was so busy that I think I only took two photographs the whole night. Simone will also be joining us tomorrow night for a little while, to get a few photographs of us on the sleep out and would like to follow what we do over the coming months, which will be fantastic! Ive added her beautiful photos from tonight on a separate post, please take a look at her page https://facebook/SRProjects4Photography for more of her work. My last thank you is to all of you lot, everyone who has shared a status, shared the group, collected donations for us, acted as a drop off zone, made food for us, donated items to us, held fundraisers for us, written stories about us, donated money to us, told your friends about us, had collections at your work place or school for us, became one of our suspended venues, helped us carry boxes, put up shelves, printed flyers and documents for us, helped us sort donations, packed bags for us, came along on a Friday or Saturday night with us and helped out, told new street friends about us, gave us boxes, clothes, fridges, furniture, toiletries, sleeping bags, rucksacks, literally to every single person who has ever done anything for this group, from the smallest help to the biggest help, thank you. You are the reason we are where we are today and the reason we are able to help so many people, week in and week out. Next month this group will have been running for one year, and in that year we have went from strength to strength, from being just a group of people who wanted to help, to becoming one of the biggest social movements of our time. We are not only making a difference to the lives of our street friends, but to the way people view others, to the way people help others and to all of us individually. We are working together to create a movement of kindness that is so great, it can overcome anything put in its way. Please keep us in your thoughts tomorrow nights as we venture out into the cold, you can still sponsor us here if you havent already: gofundme/StreetSleep thank you to everybody who has, we are almost at £900, it would be amazing if we could double our target and get £1000 on the shared page by tomorrow! I will keep you all updated tomorrow with some videos and photos of us as we brave the cold for the night, so keep an eye out for them and wish us luck!!! One love xx
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 22:06:00 +0000
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