BID Manager, Tony Johnson, has celebrated 4 years at Lancaster BID and shares some of what makes him proud of being part of the BID team.
Wow what a journey so far! Being totally honest I have enjoyed it… mostly. The biggest challenge without any shadow of a doubt was the period through the pandemic, however I don’t want to focus on that, I would like to take you back to the end of 2019.
After being in the job less than 6 months, we were very worried about the number of homeless/perceived homeless people that were on our streets, it felt like it was a problem in a lot of towns and cities but with Lancaster being quite condensed it did look bad. We had businesses complaining about it as it’s not the greatest advert for your city or town, but we genuinely felt sorry for “most” of these people. We really wanted to do something about it and through a bit of luck or right place at the right time I got talking to senior people at Lancaster City Council and Lancashire Police and long story cut short “Street Aid” was born.
The partners decided that to address the problem of the kind people of Lancaster giving money to people on the street (not the best idea if some of these people have addictions as we know from research that much of the money received keeps feeding the addiction), we would try and encourage people to donate in a different way. We purchased terminals and dotted them around the district and an online giving page was set up. Through working together along with valuable help from CVS, Street Aid was setup in 2021 and I’m really pleased to report that so far we have raised just short of twelve thousand pounds! We have given out 29 grants to people that truly need the money to either re-educate or simply replace white goods at their homes that they desperately need.
Research shows us that a lot of the transactions come from the terminals but they are a fixed donation of £3. The most generous donations originate from individuals donating on our online giving page. With the success of Street Aid we really want to continue with this great project but ideally we need to get it more visable, so if you are a business/organisation that would like to help please get in touch with Lancaster BID.
