Recently you've probably heard about our increasing work to support Faith Hope & Enterprise a charitable company which provides supported housing for some of the most marginalised members of society. Their exclusion may be due to general homelessness issues, drug or alcohol misuse, former offending behaviour, mental health concerns or learning disabilities. FHE provides a range of mentoring and support services to help people build their confidence and self esteem. Residents have a regular programme of assessment and review with a variety of activities that help them develop their life skills.

At Christmas time we regularly take up an offering to support the work of FHE which helps provide their residents with Christmas Hampers and gifts. On Sunday mornings for a couple of years now we've also been collecting 'food bank' items which are then distributed amongst residents.

At the beginning of this year Jubilee were able to support Faith Hope & Enterprise by providing an interest free loan to help them secure a deposit for an additional house in Derby. This is a new and exciting venture for both of us!

As part of this new initiative we want to encourage people from Jubilee to volunteer to help support FHE with their residents.

Kevin shared his thoughts on how volunteering would work: "The volunteer support will not be exclusive to one house. As we have been looking at a variety of other models where churches work alongside supported housing residents, we have realised that there are some really important differences in how Faith Hope and Enterprise works and we think that tying volunteers to one house significantly restricts what they could do.

Instead, we believe that more people could be involved, and contribute a greater variety of skills and support to all our residents, if we engage volunteers with everything that we do – behind the scenes, practically in all the accommodation and with a variety of face to face support tasks. Our aim is to help our residents to build positive social networks, increase the amount of support time and activities that they receive and access, improve the standard of accommodation and free specialist support staff to focus on their key roles."

FHE will provide on-going training and support for volunteers and build a team that helps to shape the future of the charity, and more importantly, the future for residents. We are very excited about this partnership and look forward to the positive changes that it will bring.

Graham and Kevin spoke about this recently at Jubilee and you can listen to this below:



To find out more please contact the church office info@jubilee.org.uk  or 01332 322655