In 2019, award-winning housebuilder the Hill Group, launched a philanthropic project, Foundation 200, to celebrate its 20th anniversary. The company's CEO, Andy Hill, wanted to give something back and having come close to homelessness himself, pledged £12 million for the gifting of 200 specially designed modular homes to house people suffering from homelessness.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought the scale and seriousness of homelessness in the UK into sharp focus as local authorities rushed to provide rough sleepers with temporary accomodation; sometimes even in the form of hotels that had been closed due to the national lockdown. But as the country emerged out of this period of confinement and hotels began to reopen, councils faced a dilemma.

Foundation 200 was seen by many local authorities as a way of quickly addressing their immediate housing needs. The 200 gifted homes were quickly allocated, yet enquiries for the homes continued to arrive from all over the country. It became clear that we needed to provide hundreds more homes to even scratch the surface of the problem. Hill reacted quickly, upscaling operations and setting up a second production facility to bring the homes to market for local authorities to order in the quantities their areas required.

Hill are specialists in building and delivering the MMC homes, but one problem remained. For these homes to be safe, supervised spaces for people to rebuild their lives successfully in, Hill needed to gift them to specialist homelessness charities with expertise in providing ongoing support to the resident beneficiaries. The Salvation Army, with its similar homelessness project and its national network of local corps made it the perfect partner to take on this role, and an official partnership was formed.

The Salvation Army will be involved in many of these new specialist housing developments around the UK and we want to support their efforts by fundraising money that will go directly towards the ongoing support and running of the homes. Please help us to raise as much as we can for this excellent cause.

We're very proud of our runners for 2021, Stacey Sargeant, Faye Wright and Matthew Bricknell who take up the 26.2 mile challenge.

A note from our runners:

Matthew Bricknell

“Running the London marathon is something I have always wanted to  complete and when the opportunity presented itself to get myself around the 26.2miles whilst raising funds for an excellent cause I knew I had  to do it. I am lucky to never have experienced homelessness and hope the money we raise will help those who have found themselves in that unfortunate position.”

Stacey Sargeant

"I have found a new lease of life in my love for running and to be able to raise money while taking part in such a bucket list event is a dream. I know people who have been effected by homelessness and I know the work Hill are doing along with the Salvation Army will not only help those less fortunate in a practical sense, but also hopefully help them see that they are not invisible and people do care. I’m so happy to be a small part of that."