Jeremy Swain
Jeremy Swain is chief executive of Thames Reach, a voluntary sector organisation that every year works with more than 4,000 rough sleepers and other vulnerable homeless people in London, providing a range of services. In 2008 Thames Reach was selected as one of the top 100 medium-size organisations in the Sunday Times Best Companies to Work for Awards.
Swain started work in the homelessness sector in 1980, moving to Thames Reach in 1984 where he spent four years as a street outreach worker before progressing to housing services manager and then chief executive of Thames Reach in 2001.
Apart from being a London Housing Foundation board member, he is also a non-executive director of StreetShine, a social business employing former homeless people to provide a shoe care service to corporate businesses. He chairs the Pan-London Providers' Group comprising the chief executives of seven of the largest providers of homelessness services in London, is an active member of Acevo (the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations) and sits on the Business Action on Homelessness London Steering Group.
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There is little about the subject of homelessness which raises the spirit. The lives of homeless people are frequently bleak, often mundane; short on glamour. Consequently, programmes about the homeless are rarely shown on prime-time TV. Instead they are shuffled off to the early-morning or late-night slot. Famous, Rich and Homeless, broadcast over two evenings in June at 9.00pm on BBC1 was the exception. It tracked the experiences of five celebrities as they faced the most extreme form of homelessness: rough sleeping.
Funerals of homeless people are frequently harrowing. I have attended too many: around three a year for the last 29 years. There is the gnawing anxiety about the size of the congregation. Will there be enough people in attendance to give them a decent send off? My worst funeral was Ken Hobart’s. When I arrived at the crematorium it quickly became apparent that I would be the only one to pay him last respects. Ken had fought with the British army during the Second World War in the Far East. It was highly likely that some of his comrades were still alive but it seems that for years before his death he was long gone and forgotten.
Blogs
"Please, I beg of you, let me give you something for nothing" 1
Tags: Major donors | Philanthropy
Most days we are rung at Thames Reach by somebody who wants to help the homeless; it is really rather gratifying. Media bods come with propositions intended to shed fresh light on ‘The Plight of the Homeless’. The Big Idea often involves them sleeping rough on the street to give a ‘down and dirty’ account of what it is like to be a rough sleeper. Quite often they are genuinely unaware that a proposal of this type is put to us at least once a month.
Last week Ian Austin, the Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government, the minister responsible for homelessness, came out on an evening shift with Thames Reach’s street outreach teams. Together we walked the dank streets of central London, Ian still in his suit and tie having raced over following a late night debate in the House.
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