Riverside ECHG - Homeless ‘tour-guides’ give advance preview of pioneering training & housing centre

30 April 2010

Homeless people took on the role of tour-guides when Riverside ECHG opened the doors for the first time on its pioneering training and housing facility for homeless men and women in Middlesbrough (Wednesday 28 April). The first phase of Riverside ECHG’s £5million STAGES Move On Academy has just been completed. When fully finished in Spring 2011 its focus will be to help people access training, support and employment as an innovative route out of homelessness and back into regular life. When fully up and running it will be home to forty-eight people at any one time. Riverside ECHG resident, Sean Brady, said: “I can’t tell you what it meant to me to get the chance to show people around because it gives us the opportunity show off our skills and let people see that homelessness is not always what the public perceive.” Resident Adam Wheatley, added: “I love doing my mosaic for the scheme’s reception. I carried on painting during the open day and I was really chuffed how many visitors came up to me to say they liked what I’d done.”

The scheme is the result of a partnership with Middlesbrough Council with funding from the Homes and Communities Agency. It has already attracted a fair amount of positive attention for its work and is regularly used at an example of good practice by other agencies working with homeless people, who come to visit the centre.

Riverside ECHG’s manager at STAGES, Colin West, said: “We do what our name says because we run a Stages Programme at the scheme. This means that any homeless person coming to us has to be willing to work with us – first in Stage 1 where we look at their issues, then in Stage 2 where they are sorting themselves out and getting training, and finally onto Stage 3 which is living in their own place but getting support from us while they are still finding their feet.”

Phase I of the development has seen the completion of the main accommodation block of thirty en-suite rooms and six independently situated move-on flats, as well as the facilities for an IT suite and an on-site webcast radio station.

Phase 2 will provide the remaining move-on flats, multi-gym, training rooms, health facilities and a Community Internet Café open to the local community.

Church Housing Trust, a charity that raises funds for homeless residents in Riverside ECHG’s schemes, has just launched an appeal to raise funds for an Employment and Training Coordinator for the Community Café who will train the residents to NVQ Level 3 in Health & Hygiene and Catering.