Watch Update From Kevin


Morning! I wanted to just give a bit of a testimony really that followed on from Adam's excellent talk last week on giving.

One of the things that Adam said was when we give to Jubilee it enables Jubilee to give to people and projects that maybe we don't have connection with or couldn't give as much to individually as Jubilee can as a church.

One of the things that Jubilee has supported is Faith, Hope and Enterprise. So, four years ago this month we had a bit of a scary time. One of our landlords decided not to continue to work with us. So, at quite short we had to re-house four of our residents and it was the last link in a whole chain really that had brought me to the conclusion that actually, it would be far better for Faith, Hope and Enterprise to own property than to lease it because it would give us real security for the people that we work with.

So, we went to try and find a mortgage and found that high street banks wouldn't lend to us for what they called reputational harm. Which effectively meant if we defaulted on the loan and they repossessed the property they'd be making vulnerable people homeless and they thought that would look bad on them!

So, we ended up in a conversation with Charity Bank, which as the name would suggest specializes in working with charities understood our model work with organisations similar to ours. The slight drawback for us what made it a little difficult is their mortgage loan to value was 70% so we were looking at buying a house for £100,000 pounds in Derby that meant we could get a £70,000 pound mortgage and we needed to raise £30,000 capital to put down as a deposit. Now we're quite a small charity and didn't really have that, so I was thinking about it, I crunched some numbers and I asked if I could see Graham.

We had a bit of a conversation and my question was whether Jubilee would be in a position to lend Faith, Hope and Enterprise, half the deposit funds over five years for a 5% return in terms of interest which was more than it gets sitting in the bank. Graham took that away, spoke with the elders and the trustees came back to me and said yeah we'd really love to lend you that money and we want to do it interest free which just blessed me so much, it was so generous and that enabled us to buy our first property, which actually some of you came and helped us decorate before residents moved in.

So, while that's all going on I'm having I have a conversation with one of our landlords. He's really supportive of the charity and we often have coffee together and he asked me how things are going and I told him what was happening and he said, oh, so would you like to buy my houses off me? We could do like one this year, one next year. I said well I'd, I'd love to do that but we can only get 70% mortgage and we can't raise the other 30% and he said oh well I'll do what your church have done I'll do it for the whole deposit interest free over five years.

Wow! So just think what you've inspired right there, but me being me said well that's amazing but if you need your money back the charity might not be in a position to pay you and I wouldn't want to put the charity in that situation. He said, oh, I won't. Take that clause out of the agreement. How amazing is that?!

So, then we start thinking, maybe there are other people around with, you know, pockets of money in their accounts who would like to put that to good social use for a good return and there are!

So, we bought that first house in February 2019. We bought the second house in October 2019. We
bought our third house in October 2020 and our fourth house in April 2021 because you opened the door and gave an example for people, who wanted to bless us.

Now while all that is going on I go to a meeting held by a local authority. There are local authorities there. There are other housing providers. People like the DWP and drug and alcohol agencies probation and someone sits down next to me who I don't know but he knows me so "Hello Kevin how's it going?" Always a bit weird quite good he said what's happening at Faith, Hope & Enterprise so I told him what we were doing. It turns out he's the director of housing at a local authority and we start talking, I started telling him well we're buying these houses and how it worked he was very interested and at the end of the conversation he said so why aren't you doing that in our area?

I said “well bottom line is house prices are really expensive in your area, I can't make the numbers stack up.” He said “yeah that's our problem too, that's why we're struggling to provide more social housing.”

So, I met with him a bit later on and the strategic housing officer and this local authority commissioned six new units of accommodation from us for which they are giving us a capital grant to cover the deposit so that we can get a mortgage. For them it's good value for money in terms of low-cost social housing, for us it opens the door to support more people.

So, basically in the space of two years your generosity of a £15,000 pound loan unlocked and opened the door to more than a million pounds of finance for us to buy accommodation and that's not even the really exciting bit, because that's just the money!

The really exciting bit is that means that at any one time we can house 20 people to support them and give them the space and opportunity to turn their lives around.

So, two quick stories. Sorry I know go on!

The first is Mia who was homeless in Derby, in hostel accommodation, the council referred it to us. We put her in that first house that you helped us buy in Derby and then we moved her into a flat on her own. She overcame addiction, her health improved, her confidence and self-esteem improved. She re-connected with her children. She found work and then she moved into her own flat and one of her sons came to live with her. Hope City Furniture helped kit out her new flat because she moved with absolutely nothing.

The second story is Chris who spoke at our AGM this week. He came to me just over a year ago. He'd had a complete breakdown in his mental health. He was faced with homelessness as a result of that. He reached out to us. We housed him in the most recent house that we have bought in Derby and because he loved gardening, we put him in touch with a local community gardening project run by a mental health nurse. So, he had opportunity just to recover, kind of just regain some of what he'd lost but he's also thinking I could do this.

So, this week he had the official opening of his CIC which we helped him set up opened by the Bishop of Derby, he's got various locations around the city where he's doing project gardening, vegetable gardening he's working with people with learning disabilities and mental illness, he's got refugees working with him, older people who can't run of their own allotment entirely on their own anymore can come along and just chip in, do some bits and pieces.

So, Jubilee, testimony first, how great is our God? He takes, he takes what we offer in faith and he multiplies it and secondly, from everyone at Faith, Hope and Enterprise, from the whole team, staff, trustees, residents, their families, the communities they impact.

Thank you so much!

Watch Adam's talk from last week: