THE homelessness charity, Cyrenians, celebrated its 50th Anniversary on Wednesday, June 27. As the charity’s chief executive Ewan Aitken explains, the charity works by establishing relationships of trust with people who are homeless or are in danger of becoming homeless, including the long term unemployed, regarding each person’s move back to full employment, where possible, as a “journey” to be taken at their own pace.
Over the last year the charity helped 900 people to get back to full-time employment and assisted a total of 5,954 people. It also works with “school refusers”, young people who have dropped out or are in danger of dropping out of school. They also support young people leaving home because of conflict with parents.
“There are many routes to homelessness and we try to address as many of them as we can. Our ambition through 2018 is to ‘journey’ with 6,000 people in case work support, and to keep the numbers up who come through our training and events programmes,” he explains.
As part of its effort to get unemployed homeless people back into secure employment, Cyrenians runs four academies, for retail, hospitality, care and construction. It also does what it calls ‘foundations to employment’, which is a suite of programmes designed to help the long term unemployed recover the skills that employers expect from staff.
“We work with people who are a long way from being employed. Everything we do is about helping people to help themselves, and putting them in control of the journey,” Aitken says.
Cyrenians works with the criminal justice system, too, in order to help rehabilitate offenders at the end of their sentence. “People who have spend time in the prison system are thirteen times more likely to be unemployed than the average person. We provide help and support both for the employer and for the person who is taking up a position with that employer,” he explains.
Very often, all it takes to resolve some of the early ‘teething problems’ that crop up when someone goes back to work after perhaps years of unemployment, is a third party who can mediate between employer and employee. “The natural reaction of employers to any difficulties is to say, “I don’t have time for this!” It is very understandable. They have their business to run. But we help to take the pressure off and to get things back on track and employers appreciate that,” Aitken says.
The Cyrenians website is a highly important and very visible ‘beacon’ for the organisation, helping to convey its principals-based approach to the widest possible audience. In 2016 the charity carried out a major rebranding of itself and a complete revamp of its site. The whole exercise was so successful that it earned the Charity an award from the Edinburgh Changer of Commerce.
As Aitken explains, part of the revamp of the website included moving to the .scot domain. “Branding ourselves ‘.scot’ instead of getting lost among all the ‘org.uk’ web addresses was very important for us. We thought at the time that moving to .scot, which we heard had recently become available, would help to make a statement about our branding refresh. After all, we are a Scottish charity working to alleviate homelessness in Scotland’s Capital city and beyond so .scot works well for us,” he notes.
The technical team behind the refresh of the Cyrenians website said that it was a very simple matter to switch the registration from ‘.org .uk’ to ‘.scot’. “I’m not sure of the technicals but I am told that our original .org.uk domain is still there but invisible. It never appears anywhere and .scot is now the visible face of the charity,” he comments. Taking this approach made the switch dead easy, but it does mean the charity has to keep refreshing both registrations each year. However, Aitken reckons that that is a small price to pay for the benefits the charity gains from its highly visible Scottish branding!
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