The House Of St Barnabas
The House of St Barnabas has been supporting those affected by homelessness for over 160 years, helping them to bring about a positive change in their lives. The House currently offers a unique Employment Training and Life Skills Programme to individuals recruited from nearby hostels and agencies. The Programme provides participants with personal development coaching, therapies focused on mental and physical well-being, a range of cultural activities and opportunities, practical and classroom-based hospitality training, and, most importantly, eight weeks of intensive work experience within Quintessentially Soho at The House of St Barnabas. Through a supportive programme of learning and integrated training, the Charity aims at creating a space within which team-work, community and acceptance are paramount, and stigmatisation is left at the door.
Quintessentially Foundation fundraising events for The House of St Barnabas:
1) Quintessentially Soho Opens in London
The launch of Quintessentially Soho at The House of St Barnabas took place on September 29th and was the talk of the town! It has been our most innovative and exciting fundraising project yet, and has been made possible thanks to a number of generous supporters and donors.
The pop-up, not-for-profit members’ club can be found in the heart of London’s Soho district and was originally planned to open for three months. Due to the unprecedented success of Quintessentially Soho it remained open for an astonishing fifteen months. The House is an historic Grade 1 listed building houses some of London’s finest examples of Georgian architecture, including a secret garden and chapel, and has been exquisitely restored by acclaimed interior designer Russell Sage.
Quintessentially Soho will raise money for the Quintessentially Foundation and its partner charities and The House of St Barnabas, a charity which helps people in London who have experienced homelessness. The House of St Barnabas has been helping to support the homeless for over 160 years, and by holding our exclusive members’ club here we aim to promote awareness and raise money for the charity.
The venue will also be the site for a series of engaging fundraising events set to take place as well as community workshops for both the volunteers at The House of St Barnabas and children supported through The Place2Be, one of the UK-based partner charities.
Click here to find out more about the opening of Quintessentially Soho
For more information on Quintessentially Soho please visit www.quintessentiallysoho.com.
Thank you to all who have supported Quintessentially Soho over the last fifteen months, please click on the links below to view a thank you from the people that you have been instrumental in helping:
1) Thank you from The House of St Barnabas
2) Participants from our Life Skills Programme 2010
In the meantime The House can be hired for a range of meetings, launches, dinners and events. By hosting your event at The House you are also providing vital funding for the registered charity, enabling them to continue offering employment opportunities to those who have experienced homelessness.
We look forward to contacting you in the near future with news on the reopening date for the members lounge.
For further information, please contact Louisa@quintessentiallysoho.com or call the Events team on 0207 437 1894.
2) The Fair of St Barnabas
Over Christmas 2009, Quintessentially Foundation worked with The House of St Barnabas to host The Fair of St Barnabas, a spectacular evening of fun and fundraising.
For the event the House and Staff were transformed for a Dickensian-style burlesque feast, complete with hog roasts, chestnuts, lobster, toffee apples, champagne and hot toddies.
Over 300 revellers in fancy dress arrived for a magical evening of weird and wonderful entertainment. For one unique evening the House was filled with magicians, singers, dancers, fairground games and Chinese dragons.
Live music, with a guest appearance from The Clash, and DJ sets carried the party on until past midnight.
All proceeds from ticket sales and auction bids were been pledged to the House of St Barnabas charity, to support and develop next year’s Life Skills Programme.
How has Quintessentially Foundation’s funding helped?
The Life Skills Programme at the House of St Barnabas firstly welcomes and accepts each person into the House of St Barnabas community. This is not a small thing. New recruits will often have been shown no care, or respect, for a long time. Making the journey to a more stable and responsible life can be intimidating and very difficult; central to our success, therefore, is the building of trust and accountability.
Then, through 1-1 coaching and counselling, classroom sessions, group work, and a range of projects that seek to rekindle our participants’ enthusiasm for life, we help to re-build self-confidence and self-esteem. Part of this stage also addresses some of the basic skills needed to manage in today’s world – diary management, time management, clear communication, good personal hygiene and presentation, basic IT literacy and internet proficiency, etc.
The focus then turns more to the life skills that are needed in the workplace – things that we all know but take for granted through our life experience: punctuality, taking instructions and being managed, asking useful questions, functioning under pressure, working in teams and accepting personal responsibility.
All of these skills are played out during the work experience placements within Quintessentially Soho at The House of St Barnabas, a charitable member’s lounge, which generates a series of stable hospitality job roles for our participants: kitchen portering, commis chef work, food running, waitering, bartending, front of house hosting. Participants on our programme are, therefore, supported through their first three months of returning to work.
The final stage of the programme helps people to find a job of their own – by helping with CV preparation, interview techniques, fine-tuning IT skills, an interview clothes shopping day with programme supporter Debenhams, and assisting participants as they work through our own networks and agencies to find jobs. We work with a variety of Employer Partners to arrange further work experience placements and training after our Programme, thereby opening doors and opportunities. The Programme also organises evening activities with local supporters: trips to the Soho Theatre, comedy nights with the BBC, a photography project with Grace Gelder photography, to name but a few.
The programmes we run last for 12 weeks, and we aim to have 25 participants on each, of which approximately 15-17 will last the course and graduate. At the moment we run three such programmes per annum, but our plans are to increase this to six per annum, aiming to help 150 participants per year away from homelessness towards a more stable, happy, and economically independent life.
Over the past year we have been proud to support over 50 participants through the Employment Training and Life Skills Programme, 38% of whom have gone on to secure paid work. The majority of our remaining graduates have gone on to further education, work placements and training opportunities. The House of St Barnabas are truly appreciative of the interest that Quintessentially Foundation has shown in the charity; it is because of such supporters that we are able to achieve such positive results.
