Cambridge Cyrenians Directors Blog May 2020

My name is James Martin and I am the Director of Cambridge Cyrenians. As well as changing locks and re-pressurising boilers I am responsible for the running of the charity and part of this is keeping you informed with this blog detailing how we are dealing the coronavirus pandemic.

Now we are over two months since the start of lockdown and with the country starting to ease its way back into a new routine, it feels like developments and policy changes are finally happening at a speed which is manageable.

During the pandemic the way Cambridge Cyrenians delivers its service has changed considerably, the operating model has morphed many times as guidance has changed, and we have learned the difficulties and pitfalls of delivering a face to face, person centred service remotely.

Our higher support properties lost their live-in volunteers right at the start of the pandemic as our German cohort of volunteers understandably returned home to self-isolate with their families. This relied upon us to have greater faith and trust in our residents to manage overnight and at weekends, and with a few exceptions this has worked better than expected. We have managed to maintain daily weekday support visits by staff, providing socially distanced support and dealing with issues in the projects.

In our dispersed lower support houses we chose to cancel all but emergency visits for the first four weeks, ensuring all residents received at least daily welfare phone calls. While most of the houses managed ok without visits, following our first round of visits it became clear that some did require a staff presence so we followed this with fortnightly visits. Now restrictions have been relaxed further, all our dispersed houses are now receiving weekly visits.

We have continued to support the clients of our Older Homeless Service albeit at a distance which has proved challenging for our more housebound clients that either don’t understand or forget about social distancing. Needless to say the service has been a lifeline to clients, most of whom fall into the vulnerable category and would have otherwise been totally isolated with no external support.

The allotment project was closed to participants for just short of two months and has just opened up, running a rota system that allows regular attendees to access one at a time and work through a list of tasks left by our co-ordinator.

So following a really difficult two months of disruption and a total change to Cambridge Cyrenians normal way of working, it is encouraging to see the various elements of our service starting to emerge from the other side. I am really proud how the staff team have adapted and stepped up to the plate during this challenge, without this level of dedication and hard work surviving the lockdown would have been much harder for many.