BIG Boss Brekkie Week, created by The Whitechapel Centre in partnership with Independent Liverpool, begins on the 20th June 2016 and needs as many Merseysiders as possible to take part to raise money to help end homeless in our community. Imagine, for one whole week, everyone in Merseyside eating a boss breakfast, at the same time, raising money to help prevent anyone from spending a night on the street!
Big Boss Brekkie Week is an opportunity to get involved with fundraising for the homeless in a fun, social and relaxed way. Like coffee mornings and cake sales, all you have to do is organise an event and invite colleagues, family, friends or people in the community to share a good breakfast for a small donation to The Whitechapel Centre. Restaurants, coffee shops and cafes can also get involved by hosting breakfast events, making a donation for breakfasts sold, , creating a “Big Boss Brekkie” menu, hosting collection buckets. Local butchers, bakers and grocers could sell breakfast ingredients for Brekkie hosts.
Why? Well we all know breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but for The Whitechapel Centre a breakfast is so much more. It can warm up a rough sleeper who has spent the night outside, give a good meal to support health and wellbeing, and it is also a relationship builder between staff and service user. A bacon butty at The Whitechapel Centre after a night on the street can lead to a conversation explaining the reasons for being homeless that the charity can resolve. Think how much we can open up when a friend invites us for a mere cup of tea.
Charlotte Mansbridge, Centre Manager for The Whitechapel Centre said: ‘When someone is feeling at their lowest, the offer of something as simple as a hot meal can mean the world, an unexpected kindness. It can build trust and allow that person to share their story. If we can find out the issue, we can immediately start looking for a solution. In our centre, we have experts in welfare and wellbeing on hand every day.’
The Whitechapel Centre serve around 8,500 breakfast each year to rough sleepers with experts on hand all day every day to prevent or resolve homelessness. This is a lot of work and fundraising underpins almost everything the charity provides. £50 could pay for 100 breakfasts and £100 could pay for seven hours of expert welfare advice. This could end homelessness for a person who has found themselves with nowhere to go.
Ruth McCaughley, Fundraising Manager for The Whitechapel Centre said: ‘We think Big Boss Brekkie Week is a great way for the community to support The Whitechapel Centre in providing solutions to homelessness. Money trickling in from each breakfast organised can soon amount to a lot and we hope that, like coffee mornings, it is easy to organise and easy to run for those of us who aren’t quite ready to run a marathon or jump out of plane. People can organise their brekkie their way with their own recipes and ingredients. We’d love everyone to join in sharing breakfasts across Merseyside in support of ending homelessness for vulnerable people.’
Independent Liverpool is really excited about the breakfast fundraiser being massive fans of a good breakfast and supporters of ending homelessness.
David Williams, founder of Independent Liverpool said: ’We’re already hearing from venues that are keen to sign-up to run breakfast events during Big Boss Brekkie Week – watch this space as we can’t name drop just yet, but we hope businesses and members of the public will be able to offer their support by dining in one of these venues. We can see that homelessness is on the increase just by walking around our city so we know how important it is to keep the doors open of organisations like The Whitechapel Centre.’
All you have to do is visit www.whitechapelcentre.co.uk/bigbossbrekkie and complete their quick registration telling them what you have planned and the rest is up to you. The Whitechapel Centre have provided you with ideas and inspiration plus a suite of downloadable material to use including posters, invite and images for social media activity.
Big Boss Brekkie Week 2016 – scran with a plan. Let’s breakfast like kings together and show our support for vulnerable people in our community.
