“The guests help us decide what the best activities to run are,” says Henry Brown, new director at Hackney Winter Night Shelter (HWNS, formerly Hackney Doorways).
Guests at the two HWNS shelters in Hackney borough have been turning their hand to arts and crafts as a way of building a sense of community and helping with the trauma of homelessness.
The charity recently changed its approach to helping the homeless. Having previously been a roving shelter that changed locations daily, the new approach is to have two permanent venues in the borough. The accommodation they offer is temporary and the goal is to get as many guests as possible into permanent accommodation after 30-40 days.
“One of the advantages of the static venues, and indeed lockdown, is that we have the chance to get to know our guests much better,” Brown told the Hackney Post. “It’s allowed us to become much more of a household.”
In recent weeks, Brown, advocate worker at the centre Sam Hassan, and their team of volunteers have been organising craft activities during the week in order to alleviate some of the anxiety associated with homelessness as well as to ease the boredom of lockdown. In the few weeks that the creative workshops have been running, Hassan has already noticed the positive effects they can have on people and the shelter as a whole.
“There are things that I think people have always wanted to try but have found it a bit outside their comfort zone,” Hassan says. “Last week we made masks, and although at the start people were a bit confused, as soon as people got painting, the laughter and the engagement was amazing.”
The shelters house guests from a wide range of nationalities, which can present a plethora of difficulties in building a community atmosphere. There is a considerable language barrier between some of the guests and those working with them, given that there are people hailing from Mexico to the Democartic Republic of Congo and beyond. Hassan thinks the workshops can be an integral part of breaking down such barriers.
“There are a couple of people who have never really spoken to each other and been introverted, or not been able to speak to each other, but the activities have been so unifying in that you don’t really need language to express emotions and communicate,” he says. “You can just use hand gestures or even just laugh, and it works to build personal bonds and make people feel part of a real community.”
Brown also says the creative work has extended to culinary matters: “A few of our guests not being UK nationals brings with it an international cuisine – it’s very tempting.”
Homelessness is often a consequence of trauma – be it a breakdown in a relationship, financial disaster or political reasons.
Brown says: “In the case of a broken relationship, there’s an emphasis on loneliness and distance being created which brings with it anxiety or depression. These sessions and the general household thinking we have in our shelters does help with that a lot.”
Guests at the shelters can also show signs of being traumatised by the homeless experience.
He says: “Often you see that hope is gone, and there is a natural anxiety that comes with the questions of: where is my next meal coming from? Where is my next accommodation coming from?”
Creative projects have long been known to help with stress and anxiety, with many studies showing that engaging in creative activities reduces levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. That is not to say that they can be the absolute solution to the complex problems that can result in homelessness, but they can provide a welcome distraction and some much-needed joy during a time that has been tough for everyone.
Hassan is busy plotting how best to develop the schemes. “We obviously need to gauge what we can do here, but at the women’s house I’ve just ordered a whole bunch of seeds yesterday so that we can start a gardening project with a ‘grow what you eat’ incentive,” he says.
“It’s not about us trying to get them to do something but something for all of us to engage in and find some common ground, and I think we all understand that. Everyone has really enjoyed it and it has really trickled through – we’ve been in an amazing mood for the rest of the week.”
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