Joined up thinking

Rain miserable rain all day today.  A day to curl up and go back to sleep.

Nevertheless, I had to leave our cozy house for an afternoon meeting at the new Tresillian House and Huggard Centre, rebuilt, opened last year when I was in Spain to provide an integrated service for homeless people combining temporary shelter, transitional hostel accommodation, and  access to services re-housing needy and vulnerable people in the Borough of Cardiff, literally next door. It's an amazing achievement to have got such a complex and ambitious project into life from the drawing board. I say that because I got to see the basic design plan for the project before funds had been raised and permissions granted about two years before I retired. I have nothing but admiration for those in public service determined to 'do the right thing' by the poorest people in our area.

Nobody involved in this enterprise is sitting back on their laurels, now the place is occupied and functional on a daily basis. The reason for the meeting was to bring together people with an interest in homeless and vulnerable people from the voluntary sector, particularly faith-community groups, and take another look at how partnership with the Local Authority might be further developed.

Since retirement I've helped others to bring to birth a training and accreditation programme for the hundreds of volunteers making up the 'Paradise Run' rota of teams offering food to people on the streets at night. This has been possible due to the good-will of the City Council's homelessness service organisation. For me, it was a follow on from the relationships started as a result of being city centre Vicar. If I'd relocated far away, I'd not have been able to take part. It's given me a feeling of being useful in an area that matters a lot to me - ensuring that strong foundations are laid to support ever-changing daily needs for the disadvantaged and making sure it remains a good-will enterprise, not a political football.

Today's meeting set out to gather people from the Street Carer initiative with others from the local churches' emergency night shelter initiative, and any other that could be identified which might benefit from professional agency support, working with the same constituency in mind - like the Food Bank - for example. Definitely a useful thing to do.

At the end of the meeting I got the tour of the new buildings and explanation of how they were operating which I would have got if I'd been in Cardiff when it opened last summer. Except that now it's all up and running, populated with keen happy staff and real service users. You can't beat that.