Help Soup Run feed London’s homeless

Homelessness is probably London’s most visible social problem. We all see it daily, in the men and women who spend their days with a paper cup, begging for spare change in the capital’s allleyways. Some of us ignore them – after all, we can’t possibly help them all. Some of us give them a smile, which always meets with kind words, yet somehow this always leaves us feeling unfulfilled.

The Soup Run, however, have decided to do more. A small group of committed students, I discovered, spend every Sunday evening gathering and distributing food to the homeless on the streets. No one is quite sure how many homeless people there are in London – estimates vary but generally fall in the range of 250 to 700. Not all of them sleep rough, but many do; exposed to the elements and the abuse and the poverty that seems far too common on the streets. On a given evening, the soup run might feed somewhere between fifty and eighty people, representing a sizeable fraction of those sleeping rough.

The homeless in London have a reputation for being rude, obnoxious and uneducated. None of those stereotypes could be further from the truth. Having been on many soup runs this year, and having spoken to people who have been doing the runs for many years, it’s safe to conclude that many of them are amongst the kindest and most genuine people that you could meet.

If you handed a surplus, slightly squashed sandwich as dinner to most people, they’d probably be insulted and give you a funny look. But to someone who can’t even afford the bread to make that same sandwich, the smile on their face is often enough to make the entire evening’s effort worthwhile (the sandwich would be even better with soup – but giving that out is not allowed for safety reasons. Talk about H&S gone mad!)

It’s not all that rosy though. Understandably, the people who use the runs become upset when we run out of food, which is an all too common occurrence. For many of them, a small sliver of cake from PAUL’s South Kensington bakery would probably be the nicest thing they’d get to eat all week.

Sadly PAUL, for some undisclosed and confusing reason, stopped supplying the run with food, leaving it struggling. PAUL’s surplus food went a long way to making sure that everyone got at least some carbohydrates to make it through the freezing winter nights on the streets of Holborn. Without this essential supplier, Soup Run must simply hope that they see how important their contribution is and once again begin donating their unsold food whilst attempting other desperate means of procurement. This, coupled with the recent (defeated) proposal by some management group representatives at the last meeting of the Clubs and Societies Board to cut the Soup Run funding to zero was deeply worrying. The committee remain concerned about how they will be able to fund the project, and procure the necessary amount of food. The hope is that in the final week of term, students will be able to donate their unused food to the project and perhaps be encouraged to volunteer over the summer if they are around, or over the course of the next year; giving the club the support that it needs.

It does seem a shame that the future of a club that contributes so much to the local community should have to worry about its most basic funding and supplies, given that it helps those in society who are amongst the most vulnerable and open to exploitation. My only hope is that by raising awareness of the work that the Soup Run does, we will be able to secure a comfortable future for the society and the people we help.

If you would like to get involved with the Soup Run, or have any materials (sugar, plastic cups, chocolate powder etc.) that you’d be interested in donating, please email[ icsouprun@gmail.com](http:// icsouprun@gmail.com)