Rob Saggs: CHESS Homeless

We supported CHESS Homeless by donating £1,000 a year to them for five years. That arrangement ended about seven years ago but we continue to support them in other ways. Today their CEO, Rob Saggs, came to give us an update. He has visited us on a number of previous occasions.

CHESS stands for “Churches Homeless Emergency Support Scheme”. CHESS Homeless was originally called Chelmsford CHESS but has now expanded its reach to the whole of Essex. Its constitution was changed recently to allow it to operate throughout the country but for the moment it is content to concentrate on Essex. It’s partner organisations include Sanctus in Chelmsford and HARP in Southend.

CHESS now has outreach teams in eight Essex cities and towns. These watch for people sleeping rough in their areas and reach out to them to offer help. They are also part of a system whereby members of the public can notify them of people seen sleeping rough. Team members will then try to find them at times when they are likely to be at the locations where they, or their tents or sleeping bags, have been spotted.

CHESS has eleven buildings around Essex offering single room accommodation for 66 individuals. There are usually about 62 on the waiting list. Fortunately CHESS has been able to acquire an abandoned hotel and its land. It is currently raising the funds needed to convert the hotel and build an additional 15 individual accommodation units on the land.

CHESS aims to help rough sleepers off the streets and ultimately back into independent accommodation of their own. To this end it first houses them in its main building, Hodgkinson House in Chelmsford, where there is 24-hour support. Hodgkinson House also houses CHESS’s offices.

When judged ready, residents are then moved to a succession of other CHESS buildings which enable them to experience increasing independence from CHESS’s support. Finally they are helped to find rented accommodation of their own and supported as they make the transition.

Rob, who is an Ecumenical Canon of Chelmsford Cathedral, emphasised that CHESS is still an organisation based on Christian principles. He paid tribute to those who had the vision to found CHESS in the 1990s and see it through its initial growth from the original Chelmsford soup run, through a phase when it organised emergency winter accommodation in church halls and on to have its own building used as a small Night Shelter. Tribute should also be paid to Rob himself for growing it to the stage where it now has 46 staff, offers 66 beds, supports rough sleepers back into sustainable independent living and operates throughout Essex.