Speaker 1 (00:00.11)
Hi everyone, I'm Maria and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast which highlights businesses, groups and people in and around Reading. If you are a Reading resident then there's a chance that you've heard of this week's highlight Launchpad, a charity aimed at providing support for those at risk of homelessness in Reading. In this episode I'm speaking with Kirsty Wilson, Head of Marketing and Fundraising at Launchpad. As always, please like and share this episode, your support is much appreciated. Let's jump in.

Hello, Kirsty, and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast. Thank you for coming on. How are you?

I'm very well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

no, my pleasure. And we are here today in Launchpad. Would you say these are Launchpad headquarters?

Yeah, and this is the main office.

Speaker 1 (00:42.572)
lovely. The number of times over the years I've passed this spot didn't know you were here.

Reading's best kept secret. If you went round the back that's the legendary coloured doors is where everybody heads for so hopefully people know that.

Yes, I did know the color doors. I think you've got your brand right on there. So before we continue, could you please introduce yourself and your roll at Launchpad for our listeners?

So I'm Kirsty Wilson, I'm the head of marketing and fundraising for Launchpad. So my team is responsible for letting people know that Launchpad is here, taking in donations, talking to community groups and schools, and just looking after our donors.

Obviously Launchpad is focused on reading specifically. We'll get into Launchpad in a sec. But first of what do you like about reading?

Speaker 2 (01:28.942)
I absolutely love the fact that we are so multicultural. The fact that at my children's school you can hear over 42 different languages being spoken. I love the general kindness and warmth of people in Reading. I think people in Reading are incredibly welcoming and I've been here over 30 years so it must be doing something right.

as you must like it if you've been here that long. I hope you do.

Yeah, just a little bit. I came for university and then ended up never going home.

Let's jump into it now. Launchpad. So what is Launchpad's mission and how does it help people in reading?

So Launchpad's mission is to prevent homelessness across Reading. So we do that with three main ways. So the first is about trying to prevent homelessness happening in the first place. So we provide a free confidential drop-in service Monday, Wednesday, Friday, anybody can turn up, you don't need to have an appointment from 10 till 2. And the idea is that people can come and talk to us about the issues they're having or any concerns they have with their housing or their landlord.

Speaker 2 (02:27.95)
and the idea being that hopefully we can stop a problem becoming a crisis. The second thing we do is we actually provide housing across Reading. So we have bed spaces for over 100 people across Reading. And when somebody comes and moves into our accommodation, typically for between six and 12 months, they're given a dedicated support worker who will sit down with them and make a plan to work out how they're going to get back on their feet again. It's not just about providing the home, it's about providing that additional support.

So that could be counselling, could be helping them get access to benefits, it could be getting medical treatment, all of the above. And we also, from April, we've been managing the pods, which are based down on Caversham Road, that houses 40 people who've got a history of a sleeping rough. And we also have a women's only project as well called Nova, which is a home for 10 women who've again experienced not great experiences sleeping rough on the streets. So it's about providing the housing, but also helping people

get the tools to get them completely back on their feet. And then the last piece of the jigsaw is our Work and Life Skills Centre, which we opened just post pandemic. And that's about getting people back into work, education, training, because that is the last piece of the jigsaw to help people pay their rent and sustain a tenancy. So we provide everything from help to do a CV and interview practice to training kitchens if somebody wants to learn how to cook or do a food hygiene certificate to get them into catering.

And then we also offer more therapeutic activities to help with things like social anxiety and confidence, so gardening and art therapy and drama. And it's a complete wraparound service, including an on-site laundrette, so if people don't have a washing machine or they can't afford the laundry, they can bring their washing with them. So it's, like I said, the final piece of the jigsaw, and we see lot of success with people ending up getting jobs or going into volunteering to give them a bit more experience.

That's amazing. mean the number of lives she must have helped and changed over the years is unthinkable really.

Speaker 2 (04:27.47)
Yeah, our support teams are amazing. Unfortunately demand just continues to grow. So last year we helped over 1800 people. That was about 22 % more than the year before. So it's that horrible combination of, as we all know, cost of living and energy prices, businesses laying people off. That's not helping and we are seeing a lot more people come to see us who would probably never consider that they'd need to come and talk to homeless charity.

Yes, unfortunately. When did Launchpad start and how has it changed over the years?

So we actually started in 1979, we've been around a very long time and originally we were set up as a soup kitchen by University of students who saw people sleeping on the streets in Reading and wanted to make a difference. That then transformed into what became Reading's Single Homeless Project because at the time we were only helping single men and over the years the size of the business has just grown, the support that we offer has extended.

and we're very good at responding to new things and being innovative. So if we see something that's needed, as in the Work and Life Skills Centre, we will work really hard with our trustees and our staff to make that happen. It's all about being centred around the client and what the client needs.

Now you indicated there that last year unfortunately helped more people than the year before. What pattern have you noticed over the last few years with people needing launch pads?

Speaker 2 (05:52.514)
think a lot of the challenges are to do with all the challenges that everyone is experiencing. So the mortgage rates going up, the energy prices, the food prices, businesses maybe shutting down. It's a difficult combination of just horrible things, which has also had the additional impact that we're seeing some landlords sell up because they don't want to pay the higher mortgage rates, which means there's then a lack of affordable housing on the market.

It means people are receiving 28 days notice to be evicted from houses that they might have been renting for years. We're seeing the Rent Reform Act is hopefully coming in as well, which will improve the standard of living. All landlords will have to commit to a certain standard. And again, we're having some people that don't want to invest that money, so they'd rather sell the property. There's also just a complete lack of affordable housing across Reading. And if you're on housing benefit, it's very, very difficult.

We can have somebody here that's ready to move on from our supported housing. They don't need our support anymore, they just literally need a home and they should be able to go and rent somewhere and the housing benefit doesn't even cover the most basic accommodation across Reading. And I think unfortunately that's a bit of a legacy that we've inherited over the past few years where there just hasn't been that focus on providing affordable housing and the rent's just going up and up.

I think that's the key thing to notice. When you think of someone who's homeless, you think it's someone who maybe has some issues or difficulties in some way. You don't think of it as maybe threatening a professional or professional couple, people with a family, people who are together, they've got jobs. You don't think of anyone like that needing Launchpad's help, but that's not the case, as you said.

No, and I think that that's a challenge with homelessness. I mean, in an ideal world, we wouldn't exist as a charity, we wouldn't be needed. And I think there's a lot of myths about, you know, homelessness is the guy on the corner who's begging with his dog and you see him every morning and there are issues there. That's not the majority of we help. The majority of people we help could be, you know, a couple who've been evicted from their flat. It could be someone who's lost his job and then lost his relationship. It could be...

Speaker 2 (08:01.332)
at someone who's fleeing from domestic violence. Homelessness isn't a choice. I think if the pandemic taught anybody anything, it was just how precarious life can be. And it just takes a couple of things to go wrong to make it very easy to be on that slippery slope and end up losing your home. We've had professors that we've helped who've been sleeping in people's garages. We've had people who've been staying with friends and sofa surfing, getting up every morning, putting a suit on, going to work.

but they're homeless, they have no home. We get a lot of young professionals who come and they're staying with friends, they can't afford the rent with their first salary. Again, they're homeless, we can help them. So I think it's about recognising that A, it can happen to anybody, and B, just people knowing that we're here if it does happen.

What can people do to stop themselves from being homeless in that situation?

If things happen, things happen, you it used to be the old cliche that you're only two or three months salary away from being in that position yourself. That's probably gone down to a month. You know, if you get a snowball effect, if we had somebody whose mother died and then he lost his relationship, he ended up staying with a friend, he then lost his job and everything happened within about six months. It was a bit of a roller coaster.

And what you find is if one thing goes wrong, it does seem to have that effect. It does seem to just snowball, unfortunately. And it's not about choices. Things happen to people and people may not cope. know, there may be people who've dealt with a lot of trauma in their lives. And actually for them, they'd rather be outside. They'd rather be rough sleeping than in a hostel. You know, there's issues with mental health, all sorts. And it's not the easy thing that I people think it is to solve.

Speaker 1 (09:48.37)
No, unfortunately. You said obviously that Launchpad is very flexible, which I think is great, and you have to be flexible according to the change in circumstances. How have you adapted, for example, this year to changing circumstances and how do you continue to overcome any challenges that are thrown at you?

Yeah, think, like I said, I think we've got very creative, very innovative teams. So for my team, for example, we were scheduled to do our flagship event, the big sleep out in spring. It was all organized. We were very excited. And in the past, we would have maybe 100 and 150 people attend. The last few years, it's been very, very difficult to get people to attend events, but also to fundraise because everybody is suffering.

People don't want to be asking their friends and family for donations or for sponsorship. So we've got the extra issue that we've got added demand for our services and then fundraising is down. So a kind of third party community fundraising is down. Like I said, we had to cancel our big sleep out and what the team did was look at alternatives. So we launched a dog walking challenge in October, which people could do in their own time.

set themselves a challenge if they're going to be walking their dog anyway, just to allow people to fundraise for us if they wanted to, but also to recognise that we're one of the only homeless charities that allows people to take their dogs with them. Again, it's quite unusual, but we know the amount of help with mental health and companionship it is to have a dog, and being asked to be separated from your dog if you're provided with a home is just going to exacerbate things. We've also signed up

to do a CEO big sleep out next April. So that will be working with a couple of local charities at the Abbey Ruins where directors, owners of small businesses, CEOs of large corporates can actually experience what it's like for one night to sleep outside.

Speaker 1 (11:47.372)
You mentioned there are CEOs and small businesses. How do you connect with small businesses? Because I imagine they are very important for the fundraising side.

They really are, they really are and there's a lot of small independent businesses in Reading who do amazing things. A lot of what we do is networking, so getting out and about, telling people we're here, not just to fundraise but to make people aware of what we do because as I said it could be anybody that's being affected by the issues we're seeing. So a lot of what I'm doing is going to businesses and saying let me come and talk to your staff, let me explain what we do.

because your staff may be struggling themselves and they're not necessarily going to tell their manager or HR. There's a lot of shame and embarrassment involved. So by us being there, we can flag that we're here and that we can help. I think it's about supporting us at events. So if you want to come along and, for instance, you could send a small team to our annual pancake race, which is legendary and hilarious and great for a bit of team building.

So signing up a team of four to run up and down Broad Street and fancy dress flipping pancakes is one end of the spectrum. We have a corporate allotment, so if you have volunteering days for your staff and you want to get them out of the office, we have an allotment where we grow fresh produce and everything that's grown either goes down to 135 to help people learn how to cook or we donate it to the local food bank. Or you could just adopt us as your Charity of the Year, so if you're employees...

If you have a community group or a charity group in your organisation and they're looking for a charity to support and you want a charity that's local and one that you know actually has an impact day to day, then we'd love to be chosen to come along and we can help with fundraising ideas, we can provide you with all sorts of merch and all kinds of bits and pieces. Or just give me a ring, have a chat if you're interested in supporting us in any way. At the moment, the severe weather emergency protocol is in place.

Speaker 2 (13:42.988)
So this kicks in nationwide when the temperature starts dropping and make sure that everybody that's on the streets has somewhere to sleep at night. And as part of that, we're always looking for donations of food and toiletries and gloves and socks and things. So again, if you can do nothing else, but you want to do a physical collection for donations in your office, then that's something that would really help us too. There are so many ways that you could support. The best thing to do is probably give me a call.

I think that goes to show it's not just about money. just, it's not, if you can't afford the money, there are so many ways that you've just pointed out there that people can help. It's because people think instantly, charity, they need money, I don't have money. But there are so many ways it doesn't have to be money.

Well, the other thing is volunteering. I we have a lot of what we do, we couldn't do without the volunteers we have. And that's everything from supporting our drop-in session weekly, for which obviously the volunteers get trained and they make a commitment to come in every week. You can be a micro volunteer, which means that if you can only spare an hour here, an hour there, you can come and help one of our events or put leaflets out or something like that. Or you can become one of our charity ambassadors. So we're actually looking for people

who are comfortable talking in front of a group, who would act as an extension of my team effectively and go out and talk to the women's institutes and the scout groups and the schools again for an hour or so, explain what we do and get them on board. So yeah, if you're interested in volunteering again, we have a lot of different options.

There are businesses out there that are not currently involved in the local community and they want to. How would you recommend they will start?

Speaker 2 (15:18.894)
I think networking is a really good place to go. So a lot of the local charities go to a lot of the networking groups locally. I think Google is your friend always if you're looking for a particular charity to support. I think supporting local is really, really the key thing. Yes, there are some amazing national charities. A lot of them are like corporates. They have very big teams, know, very big pots of money to spend. Your local charities are the ones that are having the impact in your town and your community.

They're the ones that behind the scenes day to day are helping provide counselling for young people with mental health problems who are helping stop homelessness happening, who are helping the old lady to join her pensioners club. The local charities are the ones that day in day out are helping to sort out your community and they're the ones that really really need the support, especially at the moment.

Launchpad, like I said, been going since 1979. Congratulations. What are your plans going forwards?

I think it's going be interesting. So the government are putting together a cross-parliament working group specifically about homelessness, which is going to be looking more at prevention. And allegedly that's going to involve the Department of Justice, Department for Health, to look at a more holistic approach to homelessness. So it's not just about trying to find temporary accommodation for people. I think that'd be very welcomed by a lot of homeless charities and that'll make a massive difference.

looking at how we stop this happening as opposed to dealing with it once it has happened. So that will be interesting and we will be responding to that when we know what the plans are and also what funding is made available to the local authority. Personally, our plans are to try and purchase some more properties. So what we tend to do is we tend to build up our reserves and if a property that's suitable becomes available, we will then buy a property so that we can help more people.

Speaker 2 (17:15.926)
We bought two properties last year and what we've done is actually we are now starting to provide more of what we call the move on accommodation, so long term accommodation. Because there's that gap in people being ready to leave us and that can't be filled, we've actually gone on to the rent guarantee scheme so we can provide housing for people who, housing benefit but can't find anywhere else in Reading. Which means we've got that kind of closing the loop at the other end.

And yeah, we're just looking to do more work with other partners with the Work and Life Skills Centre. So we already work with people like Reading Welfare Rights and the Job Centre and things like that to provide more offerings for people down there. And also we've moved to a self-refer model. So the Work and Life Skills Centre is not now just for our clients, it's for anybody that needs that kind of help. So we're helping the whole community.

I really like about Launchpad, one of things I really like about Launchpad is how collaborative you are. As you said there, you work with different businesses, groups, and I think that's important. Even for small independent business owners, can't do anything alone. You need to reach out, you need to collaborate, you need to go to the network, you need others around you to support you. I think that's really important.

completely and I think again the business network in Reading is very very welcoming, very helpful, very good at suggesting connections that don't even necessarily benefit themselves they just do it out of the goodness of their hearts to make things happen and that sounds really trite but I think it's very very true of a lot of people that I've met are genuinely very passionate about the town and about making a difference and I think

especially now we can actually see each other face to face. It makes so much difference.

Speaker 1 (18:57.72)
there is a very big difference. Meeting people online is great if you you need that in this first instance, but there's nothing beats this in-person feeling. As we said, Launchpad has helped so many people over the years. Do you have a story of one that you can share?

So my current favourite, which is actually part of our Christmas appeal as well, is one of our clients who this time last year, so we're talking really beginning of December now, was actually living and sleeping in his car just outside of Reading. So his Christmas day was not your average Christmas day. I think from what I recall, he was actually woken up by a phone call from his mum and he had no job, he had no prospects, he was in a really, really bad place. And after Christmas,

something prompted him to come and talk to Launchpad. He's now in an amazing place considering that was 11 months ago. He now has a flat, he has a job, he has a girlfriend and his whole life has just been turned around. And part of that is firstly that he took the step to come and talk to us. But secondly, that our support team are amazing and in a pretty short amount of time, I think it took less than two months.

We were able to support him and start to get him back on his feet again. And for this December, the aim was just to make sure that nobody in Reading is in that position again. Nobody has to spend Christmas living and sleeping in their car.

think what is key about that story is like you said, things can change very quickly for the bad, but things can change very quickly for the good too, as long as you take steps to speak to right people and let people help you.

Speaker 2 (20:34.018)
No exactly and like I said I think right at the beginning was the sooner people come and talk to us the sooner we can help and hopefully we can stop something snowballing and for some people you know it is embarrassing and they don't want to talk about it and they feel that they've let themselves down or they've let their family down. Launchpad there's there's never any judgment we've seen everything. We know people struggle we know how easily things can happen to people so yeah please just just come and see us.

Is there anything you'd to leave our listeners with, any key highlights, thoughts?

just next year, keep your eye out for the pancake race. If you've got a business and you'd like to submit a team or you'd like to just come and watch, because it is quite hilarious, that'll be happening on pancake day in Broad Street. If you'd like to take part in the CEO big sleep out, again, keep an eye out. We're all over every single social media avenue you can think of apart from TikTok. And yeah, just get in contact. If you think you'd like to support us, but you're not sure how, just give me or a member of my team a call and we'll have a chat.

you want us to come in and talk to your staff. If there's anything that we can help you with or you want clarity on anything then please just make contact. And if you do nothing else, if you could share our content on your social media, it just means we can reach more people and we might hit that one person that you don't know is struggling but really needs our help.

Thank so much your time Kirsty, I've learnt so much being with you here today and I'll put all the information that we've discussed on the landing page so if anyone wants to get in touch with you, they can.

Speaker 2 (22:03.15)
Brilliant, thank you so much having me.