Thanet Earth’s charity partner, Porchlight, was founded to help people facing the devastating effects of homelessness.
Today, they also tackle the causes and consequences of poverty and inequality. Poverty, health and housing injustice are complex problems affecting millions of lives. They are also avoidable.Porchlight work to improve understanding of the issues and find sustainable solutions to rebalance an unfair system.
On Friday 11th April, the team took on a BIG sleep out, leaving behind the comforts of home for a night to sleep under the stars in cardboard boxes and sleeping bags.
Chris Butler, Martin Rattigan, Charlie Cooke, Karen Huckstep, Amanda Miles and Kasinueda Zholi made up the team of campers; thankfully the weather was kind and following a warm day, the evening was bearable. This isn’t the case for so many sleeping out night after night.
With a goal of raising £5000, we tasked all our colleagues in the business to reach out to friends, family, suppliers and contacts to bring in the funds. Incredibly, our total rang in at £9560 including GiftAid, a sterling effort from all, and a huge thank you from the community team for all the sponsorship you collected!
Thank you to WM Camping
Another big thank you goes out to James Warrington at WM Camping in Herne Bay, who generously donated 6 sleeping bags and mats, along with lamps and torches for the event. Most of the team brought thier own equipment so these will all be re donated to Porchlight for them to hand out to those they work with.
A Night To Remember
The evening kicked off at 7pm with a talk from Porchlight. You may have read about Jacqui in our promotion over the previous weeks, and we were fortunate enough to hear from her about her real-life experience with homelessness.
We then had a shelter building briefing with Community Officer Mim Oliver, who took the team through how to build an effective shelter. Thank you to Lewis Fox for storing away ample cardboard boxes for us in dry stores! With a roll of gaffa tape each, we got to work on our homes for the evening.
We set up camp along side the dry stores using pallets to raise ourselves off the floor, and used cardboard boxes to fashion varying versions of shelters to keep us a warm as possible. Once we were set up, we got into warm layers and had chats around our lanterns before turning in just after midnight.
We were fortunate to have no wind, but it was a clear night so the temperatures dropped noticeably and we started to feel the chill.
Managing to get a few hours of sleep and readjusting to accomodate for the cold, we started to wake up with the sunrise around 5:30am. Once we were all up, we took down our shelters and reflected on our experiences throughout the night.
It really was a humbling experience for all of us, to put ourselves in the shoes of so many people out on the streets fighting the cold and damp, night after night. The work that Porchlight do to bring help, hope and a future for those battling homelessness for all sorts of reasons is so valuable and needed. There is a lot of work still to be done and the money we have raised will go far in helping this happen.
#TEBIGSleepout #Porchlight #Kent #Thanetearth
