Canterbury Open Centre
The Canterbury Open Centre, funded and managed entirely by Catching Lives, is open from 9am - 1pm Monday to Friday and provides an invaluable range of services to our daily visitors.
The centre is staffed mostly by volunteers, including students, retired people and even nuns, who help run our kitchens, clean, and often just sit and talk with the visitors to the centre. Something as simple as spending the time to have a conversation with our visitors helps greatly improve their confidence - essential in helping them build better lives and futures, something we and our partners focus on.
Services
Foremost, the centre provides some basic human needs, including; breakfast and lunch (made from donated food), showers and washing facilities, and donated clothing, footwear and blankets/sleeping bags.
The centre also offers some key new services, including; access to in-house mental health care workers, case workers, and now dentist and GP services.
Visitors To The Centre
When new visitors come to the centre our expert team quickly look to find out as much about the visitor as possible, their problems, their needs and their housing situation.
The vast majority of our visitors are from the Canterbury area, some are following what we recognise is a homeless circuit around parts of the country, some are newly homeless following relationship breakdowns or financial problems but all have problems we can help.
Those that are newly homeless we take the most concern over, as we know we have a window of opportunity to get them off the streets before it becomes habitual and deeper problems result.
Building Confidence and Life Skills
For many of our visitors, having lived rough or vulnerably for such a long time, the greatest barriers they face getting their lives back on track are the lack of self-confidence and the life skills needed to get a job or even look after themselves. Catching Lives, through the Canterbury Open Centre, is funding new projects to tackle both these issues.
Visiting The Centre
We openly welcome any visitors, whether having dropped in, or phoned for a convenient time to come along. We will show you the facilities the centre has and are improving all the time, plus we are happy to give you more insight into the work we do.