Booth Centre Meaningful Occupation

The Booth Centre is an activity and advice centre for homeless people in Manchester. It first opened in 1995.

The centre offers a wide range of activities and opportunities to its services users such as: -

A wet garden, an allotment, art workshops, computing, conservation work, cookery, English and Maths, music, photography, pottery, walking, sports, team building residentials and fishing.

Through accredited courses from Greater Manchester Open College Network , in 2005, 35 people who use the centre gained qualifications in: -

First Aid, Food Hygiene, Health and Safety and Warehousing skills, Art, Pottery, Photography, Exploring the Natural Environment and a range of I.T. skills including Desk Top Publishing and Word Processing.

The Booth Centre also offers a very successful supported volunteering and supported employment scheme, to enable people to develop their skills and confidence further.

For more details of all the above activities please visit the Booth Centre Website.

Amanda Croome, the Coordinator of the centre, believes that to run a successful meaningful activities programme you need to: -

• Get the set up right
• Ask people what they are interested in
• Offer activities that are short and be willing to change if they aren’t successful
• Have commitment from the management
• Be flexible so that people can attend as regularly as possible. Ideally each session would be a stand alone one so that people can dip in an out each week.
• Recognise and reward people's achievements. This can be done through awarding certificates. It is relatively cheap and simple for organisations to produce their own certificates. The Booth Centre holds events every 10 weeks to recognise people’s achievements and invite peoples support workers so that they can see what they have achieved. With achievements and certificates you can build up portfolios, which people can take to appointments to show people a different side to them.
• Display people's work. If you hang artwork on the walls it gives people a sense of ownership. Any artwork can be easily scanned and made into cards.
• Take plenty of photos and display them to show other people what they have achieved.
• Have a tutor who understands the needs of the client group. Tutors require support and supervision as they can often be working with challenging clients.
• Have the support of the whole staff team so that activities become central to what the organisation is trying to achieve and not an add on.
• Be integrated within the service or it will not work.
• Give the culture of change time to work.

There are many advantages to meaningful activities for participants and organisations, which include: -

• Helping people build their skills, self-esteem and confidence
• Less disruption to services and less evictions in hostels
• A change to the atmosphere of the place
• Bringing out a different side to people. You can learn more about people from these activities than by simply talking to them