Fifty years ago in 1975, The Whitechapel Centre opened as a small Liverpool day centre on Whitechapel itself in the city centre, supporting single homeless men and women. Since then it has become to a leading homeless and housing charity for the Liverpool City region, maintaining our commitment to work with people who are sleeping rough, living in hostels or struggling to manage their accommodation. We help people to find and maintain a home and learn the life skills essential for independent living - we never give up on any single individual and we work with over 4,000 people a year. Our projects reflect the diverse routes into and out of homelessness. A variety of services, in different settings, compliment each other and ensure no one slips through the net of support.

Depressingly, we are facing one of the most demanding years in our history and the homelessness problem on Merseyside and nationally is worsening - resulting from a complex combination of increased levels of poverty, the scarcity of decent housing and the paucity of specialist social and health services - this is why we desperately need your financial support to sustain and hopefully develop our vital services to the precariously housed and those who are already homeless including rough sleepers

One of our trustees, Steve Collett is undertaking a yearlong challenge and we hope you will support his efforts in you are able to. To sustain and encourage him throughout the year in completing a total of 500K swimming (Liverpool University Pool) and 5000k cycling (on the highways and byways of Merseyside), please consider sponsoring Steve him not only with one-off donations but also on a quarterly basis when he provides progress updates

Val Metcalf MBE

Chair of Trustees