Threshold Housing Link, Swindon’s longest established homeless charity, has purchased an additional property to accommodate and support homeless women who are sleeping rough and engaged in sex working in Swindon.
Threshold’s latest project will support addressing the complex health conditions, substance dependence, unmet mental health support needs and other vulnerabilities that had caused these women to face enormous obstacles in moving away from living on the streets.
Threshold’s chief executive, Michael Keenan, said “This project house is unique in that it is the first of its kind in Swindon, established to address the needs of homeless women, with multiple identified vulnerabilities, who desperately seek to exit rough sleeping and engage with medical and psychological treatments that address the physical and emotional trauma they have been subjected to and experienced in profoundly impactful ways.
If left untreated, ill health and trauma will typically entrench these individuals in a downward cycle of misery and suffering which can be so difficult to transcend”.
Jason Biggs, project lead, stated “This project will absolutely address the most urgent and essential needs of these women in a way that has not previously been undertaken in such a joined up or extensive manner, which we trust will meaningfully interrupt, hopefully break, the cycle of perpetually moving between emergency housing and rough sleeping, sex working and serious levels of illicit drug dependence.
As a pilot project started at a great pace due to acute need and rising numbers of deaths among sex workers we have secured no funding whatsoever to provide for the support costs this pilot project will require. We remain very much dependent, much like we have been for the past 49 years, on the continued generosity of locals, particularly business leaders and professionals who contribute their skills and money to help Threshold provide a chance to change.
We are developing training and enterprise facilities to support the women and other homeless individuals and we would thoroughly welcome many forms of support from the business community at large, who we hope will reach out to us with ideas and offers”.
To follow the work Threshold undertake, visit and follow their Facebook page @THLSwindon.
You can support the project by making a donation via bank transfer to ‘Threshold’s A Chance To Change Fund’: Sort Code 230580 Acc.No. 42468142
