Amanda Sidwell from Making A Difference Maidstone appeals for investors to help the homeless charity buy its own accommodation.
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00:00Hi, I'm Amanda from Making a Difference to Maidstone Charity. I'm the founder.
00:04Madam's been going since 2006, actually 2015 and 2016 we had our first premises.
00:12We're a faith-based charity, we're a Christian charity and God is my boss.
00:18He put me here to work amongst homeless and addicts and we've seen a real
00:21increase in our ministry work and our serving in Maidstone. It's just been
00:26notable, noticeable with this increase. So really, so this has been rebirthed
00:31again about us having accommodation and one of the reasons for this is one of
00:36the hotels that we use, we put people in accommodation and we're discerning who
00:40we put in accommodation but we do that when people are homeless and some
00:44clients come to us that we're going to put in a hotel. We've been using, one of
00:47the hotels we're using is Rockhouse Hotel in Talmage Road and we just found
00:51out recently that it was up for sale and it just got me thinking, gosh there's
00:55only Rockhouse Hotel, there's Grangemore that we also use but we know that they
00:59put in planning to turn one of their buildings in I believe to an HMO and it
01:04just made me start thinking again, you know, maybe we need to resurrect this
01:08about getting accommodation. I also do a lot of partnering, I do a lot of
01:11networking out there and I've got to meet a lot of people in different areas
01:15of housing and homelessness and provision services that also know what
01:22Madam's about, see her heart and said that they would love to to come and work
01:25with us in that area. So what we're doing now, we're putting out a
01:30plea, we don't have the money to buy a property, I mean Rockhouse itself was
01:34£795,000, I did actually go to view it. I'm a sort of woman that doesn't leave
01:39any stone unturned, I just have to go and see it and it's beautifully appointed,
01:4315 bedroom property and it's worth every penny of nearly £800,000 and I just
01:49think it's such an amazing investment for somebody. I mean if you see this as
01:53an investment, you're investing into property, very rarely does property go
01:56down, whether it's one big investor, whether it's two or three investors,
02:00that's what we're really looking for. You know, we can look for funding but funding
02:04is very tight at the moment and then once we've got the accommodation of
02:07course, one needs the appropriate staffing and everything else needs to be
02:11put in place. But when you're sending people out onto the street, the other
02:15week I was in tears, it just really got to me, we just kept saying there's
02:18nothing else we can do, we have no other alternative. What we're looking for to
02:22achieve this accommodation and this project that we have on our heart is for
02:26people to come forward, be it businesses, be it entrepreneurs, you know whoever's out
02:32there that has the money that they want to invest and there are investors, we all
02:35know that, but they feel that they want to invest to make a difference to
02:38Maidstone. If this is your town, if this is your community, you know, we don't
02:43want to see people out on the street, we don't want to hear about somebody who's
02:47lost a job, therefore they're going to lose their accommodation and these have
02:50been people that are in their 50s or someone who's now got a health
02:53issue, cancer. We had a gentleman that has cancer and he had a stomach
03:00bag and he was living in a tent and he was a mature man and this is the reality
03:06of what we find. We have breakdown in relationships with husbands and
03:11wife or couples and often the man has to leave the home, the wife stays there with
03:16the children, he needs accommodation. So there are some people that really, we
03:21want to invest in their lives so that we can make a difference in their lives and
03:25they can make a difference in the community as a whole.