About Emmaus

Emmaus Communities can offer a real, long term solution to homelessness. Emmaus offers a home, with no limit on the length of stay, and a family environment with practical, everyday support.  

Emmaus provides work on the community business, collecting and refurbishing donated furniture and household goods and re-selling them in the community shop. This allows companions to sign off primary benefits such as Job Seekers Allowance as they support themselves and the community by their own hard work. 

Emmaus is proud of its “green” credentials. Communities take things which would otherwise be thrown away and make them useful again. From bicycles to furniture to electrical goods – all kinds of things are restored and re-sold, or their parts are salvaged for re-use, helping to save waste at the same time as supporting the community.

Emmaus offers a way out of the loneliness and rejection of homelessness.  By living and working in Emmaus, people recover their self-respect,  discovering for themselves how to take responsibiltiy for their own lives as well as helping others less fortunate than themselves.  Any surplus from the business is used to help those in  greater need, for example by supporting a local soup-run, or providing furniture for those who cannot afford to pay for it.

Every day Emmaus Communities have to turn away people in desperate need due to lack of space.  With your help, Emmaus will consolidate and expand its network of communities to provide more people with a new start in life.

Our history

 The first Emmaus Community was founded in Paris in 1949 by Father Henri-Antoine Groues, better known as the Abbe Pierre,  a priest, MP and wartime resistance hero. 

Emmaus started when Abbe Pierre met a man called Georges who, homeless and despairing, had tried to commit suicide in the Seine.  The Abbe Pierre did not just offer him a place to sleep.  He asked for his help.  He told Georges of the homeless mothers who came to him for help for them and their children and how he could not cope with the problem on his own. 

Georges became the first Emmaus Companion, living with the Abbe Pierre and helping him to build temporary homes for those in need, first in the priest’s own garden, then wherever land could be bought or scrounged.

George was joined by more companions. One day, money became short. So the former MP and resistance hero put on his cassock and his medals and toured Paris asking for donations. But the companions, instead of being grateful for his efforts, firmly told him that begging compromised their – and his – self respect.  Instead, to raise the money they needed, they became “rag pickers”, taking things that people no longer wanted and selling them on. 

So the concept of companions running self supporting businesses, with the profits going to those in greater need was born.