Thanks for taking the time to visit the Hood Group's JustGiving page.

The Hood Group is a company that specialises in the insurance market; offering services for selling, third party administration or client solutions. The Hood Group supplies jobs for 200 people in the Southend area but we also like to support our community in other ways.

The company has a team dedicated to supporting local charities that may not get the recognition or funding they require. One of those charities is HARP who are based in Southend and support the homeless people of our local area.

“HARP began as a Job Club in 1987 in Valkyrie Road but with an increasing number of homeless people using the service, it developed into Southend Centre for the Homeless with the later addition of Southend Night Shelter. These then split into two organisations running successfully for many years. Our services were run on a shoestring, relying heavily on volunteers.

The two organisations were encouraged to join together to provide a more cohesive service to homeless people. Therefore in 2002 the Day Centre and Night Shelter joined to become the Homeless Action Resource Project (HARP). A new Board of Trustees was set up with responsibility for the administration of HARP and in March 2003, Gill Garwood was employed as Chief Executive.”