Putting yourself in someone’s shoes is the best way to understand some of the difficult experiences they face. Our Sleep Easy event does this to help raise awareness and to demonstrate the challenges faced by those our YMCA works hard to help.

This is our 4^th year of running the Sleep Easy event and we are grateful to all those that have given their time or donated to this event and hope they walked away with more understanding as to why we need our communities to help us support those at risk.

To give more of an insight of how we do this, we wanted to talk about where the donations go from this event and how they directly help those who are living near or in homelessness.  The Southampton and Basingstoke YMCA run some of our most involved housing services. Together these services offer not only furnished accommodation for young people, but also a programme of life skills to help them including modules like CV writing and budgeting, mental health, group support sessions, cooking, and activities in areas such as gardens or within the communal rooms. All these are provided to the youth that deal with income and shelter challenges. With your donations we can continue these services. Beyond these services, donations can also be used to add value through the funding of clothing, shoes and other rewards for personal development progress. They also run social projects often decided by the tenants that can help them accomplished task and be part of something bigger than themselves.

We hope seeing the direct impact your time and effort can have helps bring you out to Sleep Easy next month. If you cannot make it donations or sponsorship can be made by contacting us. We have seen your contributions exceed £3000 every year so far and hope to continue to keep this trend! Thank you all for working alongside our YMCA family and for helping our communities work towards giving a happy healthy life to everyone.

If you would like to find out more, about this year’s Sleep Easy event, how to enter, how to sponsor or donate or how to support in any way; it is being held on Saturday 17^th March, please visit https://ymca-fg.org/events/sleep-easy-2018/