Our charity partner Knight Support is a great service for the homeless and rough sleepers in Brighton & Hove. We are aiming to offer further support this year and need your help too

“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.” Mohammed Ali

The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee in the UK Parliament today announced the launch of an enquiry into the effect of COVID-19 on homelessness and the private rented sector, designed to review how effective the Government support has been and take a look at the proposed strategies that will be put in place to support the sectors in the long term. They are inviting written evidence for review by 1st May 2020 to ensure that the support is sufficient and continuous after the current measures in place expire.

This made me stop and think. This is a weird, stressful and troubling time for all of us, but just think how different it would be for you if you had nowhere to go, if you were a street sleeper or perhaps in between homes and been sofa surfing.

At Target Five and Sussex Property Partnerships we have had a long standing commitment to give back to our local community and have been working closely over the last 12 month with our charity partner Knight Support. https://www.knightsupport.co.uk/

We previously have held events to support and provide a safe space for the most vulnerable of our community and try and use our contacts, network and business position to help Knight Support. Our Boxing day curry party was a great success. Held in one of our clients empty properties and supported by our contacts making donations, providing food and generally just being an ear to chat. We were intending on continuing these events through the year but of course the social distancing measures have prevented this. We will start these again as soon as we can.

We provide a store free of charge to the service to help keep costs down, the generous donations that people of Sussex provide need to be sorted, distributed and where possible sold. This storage area helps with that huge task. We are hoping to help with more permanent premises for this in the near future.

We provide administration support to founder Lynne Knight and her team, to make sure the applications for grants, funding and general flyers etc can be completed in the most cost effective way.

Just this week we have had ‘virtual’ meetings with Lynne about how we can help further and make sure the street sleepers, homeless or nearly homeless are supported during this worrying time. We are aiming to apply for full charity status and my business partner Andy Babbayan and I are intending on becoming trustees of Knight Support.

For now all we can do is keep supporting in any way and we can and ask you to do the same. If you want to help us support this amazing service, get in touch and we can discuss the best way you can help.                                                      Tina Wenham Director Target Five