The Gatehouse and the Covid-19 pandemic:

With the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic continuing to hit the UK hard these are turbulent times for all of us. Not surprisingly, the Gatehouse has needed to adapt to the ever changing circumstances over recent times, but we continue to do our best to provide essential support services for Oxfords homeless and vulnerably housed community.

Early on in the initial lockdown rough sleepers were placed in temporary accommodation by Oxford City Council, which provided them with both food and shelter. Our attention then turned primarily to our guests within the vulnerably housed community, and although we had to close down our community centre temporarily we very quickly launched a home delivery service providing food and other essential items to those in need, particularly anybody sheltering or in self isolation.

Alongside that we also expanded our 1 to 1 personal support service extensively and moved to online and telephone operations, helping individuals to cope with issues relating to the new situation surrounding the pandemic as well as the more usual health, addiction, finance and housing issues.

In late June 2020 with many rough sleepers being moved back into accommodation within the community, and therefore needing additional support, we opened a takeaway café service at our community centre. Numerous other individuals suddenly finding themselves suffering from the negative economic effects of the pandemic have also been referred to us for support and have benefitted from our current range of services.

Overall with additional costs for PPE and cleaning materials, plus a loss of most of our free food donors and having to rely on paid staff rather than a large volunteer base we have seen a considerable rise in costs this year.

So where do we go from here and how can you help?

Firstly we need to continue offering all of the above services for the foreseeable future in order to meet ongoing high levels of demand. It is likely that the impacts of Covid-19 will continue over the winter and we are planning on offering these multiple levels of service well into 2021, and reintroducing other services at our centre as soon as conditions allow.

Although we obtaining funding from various grant giving bodies, we still rely very heavily on donations from individuals in the local community to be able to offer all of these free services, which is why we have set up this Appeal. All donations, however big or small, will make a difference, and these Appeal funds will go directly towards our food provision services (both home delivery and takeaway café).

What will your donation buy?

A donation of £5 buys sandwiches and hot drinks for a guest for a whole week

A donation of £20 provides PPE and cleaning materials for one day

A donation of £50 pays our home delivery transport costs for a week

A donation of £200 covers staff salary costs for running our takeaway café for one evening

If you would also like to help in other ways then check our website at www.oxforgatehouse.org for up to date details on volunteering, food donations and much more.