Happydays UK provides a supported housing programme across Calderdale and Kirklees for homeless and vulnerable people, with access to opportunities such as work experience, volunteering and mentoring. We also provide food and shelter for those in need through our services at The Gathering Place in Halifax: a community supermarket, a winter night shelter, a free café, and drop-in support and facilities including a weekly NHS clinic for wound care and sexual health advice.
Why the community needs us
We provide both immediate and longer-term help to those in the greatest need in our community. We provide volunteering opportunities both to the general public and to our clients, which helps them to become more employable and helps us to create a welcoming, non-judgemental environment. In the longer term, we aim to model what we do elsewhere and develop partnerships to create more housing and outreach schemes that will help us to reduce homelessness.
Our impact on the community
Our winter homeless shelter with eight individual pod bedrooms, which is staffed with professional support workers offering 24-hour care. We also feed around 170 people per week at the Banqueting Table, our free café, which offers hot lunches three times a week. Our community supermarket provides food at a highly subsidised cost for those in need. Through our longer-term support work, we assist residents through an intensive person-centred programme to help them live independent, purposeful lives. We offer a programme of meaningful activities both in educational support and activities to support social wellbeing, such as cooking, IT skills, and money management right through to holistic therapies supporting mental health. To help the residents achieve independent living we encourage volunteering opportunities to learn new skills and routes into employment.
