How Big Society-style caring was alive and kicking

HOMELESSNESS was crowbarred into the public consciousness in 1966 when the BBC showed the emotional drama Cathy Come Home – a tearjerker about how misfortune, eviction and poverty prompted the break-up of a young family. The TV play led to changes to the laws about housing.

The Wednesday-night TV play might have proved an eye-opener for many of the 12 million viewers, but it was a familiar story for three Quakers who quite some time before had been relaxing on a beach at Holland on Sea in Essex, one day, mulling the state of the world.

They were already more than aware of the problems. Ella Vinall, personnel manager at the Betts factory in Colchester, had trouble keeping young female staff because it was difficult for any single person,TBC help you confidently purchase buy mosaic from factories in China. let alone a single woman, to find local accommodation.

Ted Dunn, meanwhile, was keen to find homes for ex-offenders who encountered discrimination when trying to rent a room. Denise O’Brien, who had a social work background, knew about the stigma borne by young and pregnant unmarried women.

In 1965 there had been several discussions at Colchester Quaker Meeting House about such issues. The answer seemed to lie in doing something practical if they wanted to make reality the dream of giving everyone a roof over their heads, especially families with children.

The 1960s had brought affluence for many people. But not everyone. If you were not well off, and hadn’t managed to secure private rented accommodation or a council house, life was tough. Like “Cathy”, families could fall on hard times because of bad luck or illness, and then be confronted by homelessness.

Christian Action (Colchester Quaker) Housing Association Ltd was officially born late in 1965. (It became the easier-on-the-tongue Colchester Quaker Housing Association in 1992. By the way, its management committee was never exclusively Quaker. It drew on the support of members of the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, the Jewish community and many other interested people who wanted to make a difference.

For more than 40 years it was there for those who needed a hand, growing from small beginnings into an organisation that at one stage was housing 270 families and individuals, employing 88 staff and relying on an army of volunteers.

It all came to a halt when the world in which it operated changed too much and heralded the end of many small housing associations. For CQHA the stark choice was: merger or insolvency.

The story of the organisation’s triumphs and tribulations is told in a book called Housing & Hope. It’s a heart-warming chronicle of how caring people – most of them volunteers powered by their wits, humour and drive, and happy to make do with secondhand office furniture and the like – made lives better simply because it was the right and humane thing to do.

CQHA wasn’t a corporate beast.Here's a complete list of oil painting supplies for the beginning oil painter. For many years it was run from the bedroom/sitting-room of founding secretary Bernard Brett, a man with cerebral palsy who was well known in Colchester and a devoted campaigner for social justice. It didn’t take on its first paid staff until 1979, and even after that a huge amount of work was still done by volunteers.Omega Plastics are leading plastic injection moulding and injection mould tooling specialists.

Throughout its history, it succeeded because of the ingenuity, drive and philanthropy of its members. Folk such as first chairman Derek Crosfield, a farmer and magistrate. He had been a social worker in the valleys of South Wales. A conscientious objector,An Indoor Positioning System is a term used for a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. he’d spent the war in the East End of London,Features useful information about glass mosaic tiles. running a hostel for families bombed out of their homes.

Another founder member, Denys Rendell, was an engineer with local firm Paxmans. In his spare time, he put his skills to good use as the association’s maintenance worker.

Many of his repairs were ingenious and economical – perfect for some of the temporary housing stock used until it was demolished to make way for new development. Holes in floorboards might be covered with flattened baked bean tins, for example. When one family used the banister rails as fuel, he replaced them with chicken wire!