DOORWAYS BRIEF

Doorways was co founded by Craig (a full time working fabricator) and Lisa Wheatley (a school cook) in May 2015 to help homeless rough sleepers(around 15) in Derby city centre by providing them with a hot meal, a sandwich pack and a hot drink. This issue was brought to our attention after Lisa had helped another group within the city by cooking meals for them to give out to homeless people. We set up the group with friends and a few family members to help make sandwiches and distribute the items out and went out 3 nights a week. It soon became apparent that there was a bigger issue within the city of more vulnerable people than we had anticipated. People were coming to use our service from hostels, shared accommodation, people in their own property on low income and even people with no life skills to cook for themselves. Our numbers increased quite quickly and numbers went up to around 60 visitors by the end of 2015. 4 years on and with the backing of several businesses whom donate end of day food items, having a facebook page with over 5000 members which members donate items when needed and having a core group of volunteers that help with cooking and the running of Doorways on our nights out, we regularly see over 100 visitors on each of our nights out now and have recently become a non profit making registered charity (1182774). Our aim is to have access to a building which we can use to cook the meals, use for storage and have as a drop in centre for people to come to for information in our sector, this is along side still having our pop up street kitchen 3 nights a week.