One day early in November my wife, Ally, approached me with
tears in her eyes. One of her friends had posted The Rucksack Project video on a
Facebook group that she belongs to & it had moved her profoundly. She asked
me to watch it & I did. Within minutes we had agreed that we needed to
create a Rucksack Project event near to home.
After some discussion with friends we calculated that Bradford was the nearest city to us that might truly benefit from the Rucksack
Project. Within a few days I’d made contact with Mathew White, founder of The Rucksack Project, & created an event page on Facebook. Ally & I
launched the event on our Facebook pages. The response was astounding. Within
one week over 100 people had pledged their support. As people joined the event
they shared it on their own Facebook pages, causing it to go viral. By the day
of our event, almost 500 people had signed up to it.
Prior to this event I’d only been to Bradford on a couple of
occasions. It was a steep learning curve trying to identify & locate all
the homeless projects that served the City. So, I hauled my mate Danny (who
doesn’t ‘do’ Facebook) on board &, with his help, managed to find &
either visit or contact just about every homeless project in the area.
Despite having identified December 21st as the
day of our main event, we quickly decided to ask people to put some rucksacks
together so we could hand them out earlier. Winter was rapidly approaching
& it seemed crass to hold onto all the rucksacks until that date.
Additionally, many people wanted to be a part of the Rucksack Project but
couldn’t make the main event. So, I
identified a number of collection points where people could drop off their
rucksacks & other items of clothing, enabling me to pick them up & distribute
them almost immediately to several homeless projects. Nige Mason offered up his
garage in Idle as the Bradford collection point, Hanna Bennett from People First at the Furniture Project in Keighley volunteered to receive rucksacks
from Keighley folk and Ally offered up her shop, Crystal Space, as a collection
point in Silsden.
One of the homeless projects we connected with was Hearthounds UK, a charity working with homeless people & their dogs.
Danny & I met up with them one Thursday evening, together with people from
the ‘Streetwise’ project who were handing out warm meals in Centenary Square.
It was the most humbling of experiences as we handed out rucksacks to several
homeless people whilst Carrie & John from Hearthounds talked to a homeless
person & his dog. Fortunately, we had a bag full of dog food & treats
with us that someone had donated & were able to hand them over to him
together with a rucksack. His gratitude totally rocked my soul.
When we began planning our event in early November, I had a
vision of us all forming a flash mob & descending on Centenary Square to
hand out our rucksacks directly to homeless people & rough sleepers. I
gradually began to realise the impracticability of my grand plan, particularly
when the number of volunteers ascended into the hundreds. The more I thought
about it the more it made sense to distribute our rucksacks as widely as
possible so that they would reach & benefit as many people as possible.
With hindsight, it was the best decision, given the veritable mountain of
rucksacks that we built in the space of one hour at The Great Victoria Hotel …
too many by far to take out & distribute among the homeless in one fell
swoop.
And what a wonderful venue The Great Victoria Hotel turned
out to be, run by an equally wonderful bunch of people who not only let us have
the rooms for free but also threw in free parking for us all & mince pies
to boot! Huge thanks to Becca Porter, the Meeting & Events Sales
Co-ordinator at The Great Victoria, who bent over backwards to accommodate our
every need &, also, to the indefatigable Helen Rigby from FUNdraising 4 U
who approached the Hotel in the first place & who worked so tirelessly
& selflessly to make our event a success.
Yet, having taken a rucksack along to the Manchester event
the following day, there is nothing to compare with actually handing over a
rucksack to someone who desperately needs a change of clothes, a sleeping bag
& a waterproof coat. I was privileged enough to mingle with many of the
Manchester people who received a rucksack. Their gratitude was so clear to see
& their stories heart-wrenching at times. How incredibly tragic that the
vast majority of people’s over-inflated egos cause them to swerve the issue of
homelessness.
Before we reached the Manchester event in Piccadilly Gardens Ally & I stopped to talk to a homeless person sat outside the Costa Café on the edge of the square. His face lit up when we engaged with him & he proudly took up his guitar & played a song for us. He had a story to tell & we listened to him for a while. Given our backgrounds in psychiatry it seemed to us that his homelessness was quite probably related to a lengthy history of severe mental health problems. And hundreds, possibly thousands, of others merely passed him by … either repulsed by his difference or, sadly, too focused on their own personal Christmas missions to even notice him.
Back to the Bradford event & that incredible swell of
rucksacks in the centre of the room. Every single person present (& lots
more who would have loved to have been there but couldn’t make it) was brimming
with a genuine desire to help, to ease the discomfort & suffering of a
homeless person. Christmas, that thing that glitters & dazzles in every
supermarket & department store from the middle of October, had suddenly
taken on its original meaning again. This was a Nativity scene being played out
right in front of our eyes: people arriving & laying down their gifts to
the cause. It was a moment of true giving with absolutely no thought of reward
or recompense but for the common wages of our most secret heart … that inner glow
that thrums gently deep in our innards.
