While preparing for our fundraiser this Friday (9 acts, 2 venues, £10 advance tickets) I wanted to create a really impactful poster which got me thinking about the famous cancer research statistic.
I wonder, I thought, how many people in Kingston are likely to need our support in their lifetime? So I set about digging around the data.
I grabbed the last 5 years of new registrations, I picked out age as an important metric, because we know empirically that the chances of experiencing a housing crisis are not the same across a lifetime, in fact it’s heavily weighted towards between 20 and 40 and drops off slowly into the 80’s (sadly, still not impossible, even at this point in life).
Then I needed to know the population of Kingston, turns out there are over 175,000 of us! I removed the children (18%), because our remit is single adults, and I did some maths…
1960 unique people over 5 years, 94.4% of which reported rough sleeping, sofa-surfing or imminent homelessness, weighted across the age ranges and totalled equals an overall 17.5% risk over a lifetime.
Rounding that up as a margin for error, the statistics show that over their lifetime, a Kingston adult has a 1 in 6 chance of directly experiencing a housing crisis.
Now take a minute, think about your friends, your Whatsapp groups, the classes at your children’s school, in a class of 30 children, 5 of them will grow up and need our help at some point.
We aren’t just a “nice to have” service in Kingston, we are an essential.
Our staff is comprised of over 50% front-line workers, and we are incredibly grateful for the funding we receive from the Royal Borough of Kingston (RBK), as well as from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID). Every penny of income comes from hard graft: pitching and bidding for grants, shouting from the rooftops about what we do, telling the stories of the people we’ve helped, building relationships with schools and businesses, and putting on events across the year.
By subscribing and reading this newsletter, you 1500 people are part of our community, your interest in and understanding of the work we do is invaluable, I like to imagine you talking about KCAH whenever the subject of homelessness comes up and I know many of you are instrumental in putting on your own fundraising events for us, and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
I have a project pack for young people, designed for bronze Duke of Edinburgh participants, which outlines how to design and promote a satellite sleep out in conjunction with our own, taking place on the 10th of October (World Homelessness Day), get in touch if you want to join the project.
Thank you again for your continued support.
