A pair of converted double decker London busses will be driving around the streets of London this winter with an extremely honourable mission.
Instead of taking you to the pub and back – of course, this is also a vital service – these two vehicles will become mobile care centres for the capital’s homeless population, which currently stands at over 3,000 people.
Offering medical help, showers and haircuts as well as help to find accommodation, the busses are a new initiative from Change Please, who also have a coffee shop business which trains homeless Londoners to be baristas. Rough sleepers will be able to access the busses services by texting them and by 2022 it is hoped that the busses will also be able to provide coronavirus vaccinations.
The bus project has the official backing of London Mayor Sadiq Khan and NHS England is providing GPs for the service. Change Please founder Cemal Ezel has said: ‘By providing somebody with a haircut, a shower, a change of clothes, and then they leave with a Polaroid picture of themselves, hopefully they start to remember the person that they used to be and the image of the person that they used to be, which is for us that building block back into them rebuilding their confidence and their self-belief, again to try to have that end goal of them reintegrating back into society and leaving long-term homelessness.’
He added: ‘Someone might be sitting there with a tumour, or growth somewhere, or a black toe, or persistent cough, or a pain in their arm or something like that, and their level of confidence, self-esteem, self-belief, self-worth is so low that actually they just put it to one side.’
How has London's homelessness situation changed since the pandemic?
Pod homes are being built for London's rough sleepers
0 Comments