On Friday, October 12th, the staff at Comfort Keepers will be sleeping out in our place of work to highlight the issue of homelessness in Ireland, as part of the Shine A Light Night 2018 campaign.
Shine A Light campaign is a truly touching event where the Irish business community comes together for one night to raise vital funds for Focus Ireland, and to stand in solidarity with the staggering number of people experiencing homelessness across the country today.
We are proud to be involved and to support Focus Ireland who works with people every day who are homeless or are at risk of losing their homes across Ireland each and every day. Focus Ireland’s core mission states that homelessness is “Wrong because it is a failure of society that creates victims out of ordinary people and robs them of their potential. Wrong because it can be prevented, it can be solved but is allowed to continue and in doing so, undermines society”.
The most recent figures show a record total of 9,891 homeless people at the moment in Ireland, with the total number of people homeless rising by 24% from July 2017 to July 2018. More than one in three people in emergency accommodation is a child, meaning that there are 3,867 children in emergency homeless accommodation with their families at present. More than half of those children are under 8 years old, and on average more than 60 families a month become homeless in Ireland.
Since 2012, Shine A Light Night has raised over €3 million for people who are experiencing homelessness all over Ireland. In 2017, this support enabled Focus Ireland to help over 14,500 people. Therefore we are joining them again this year to help Shine a Light of hope on Ireland’s changing landscape of homelessness.
Our Head of Marketing Rosanna Martin will be joining other leaders from companies such as Google, Facebook and Three at the Business Leaders Sleep-out. Director General of RTE, Dee Forbes, explains why this is such a worthy event for the business community to be involved with.
We’ve decided to take part in Shine a Light 2018 because we want to raise money and make a difference. Please help us by giving whatever you can on our donation page here. The more people that know about Shine a Light Night 2018 the greater the impact it will have, so please also spread the word…
Thank you in advance for your generosity, every euro makes a difference! Please donate whatever you can using this link: Shine A Light Donations
