My best friend (a strategist and incredible human, Charlotte Cramer) and I sat outside a coffee shop in 2015 when a homeless man approached us and asked for spare change.
We said no.
We realised we are bad people.
We saw that everyone else at that coffee shop was also turning him away.
We wrote the brief: How do we get people to hand over their cash on the streets when they assume it’ll be spent on drugs and alcohol?
We came up with ‘CRACK + CIDER: Shop for the Homeless’ . A shop where you can buy essential items for London's rough sleepers and we distribute them across the capital. We sold backpacks, winter coats, gloves, socks, hats, fleeces, dog food, women’s toiletries and people could shop just like any other, only they didn’t take the item home, we got it to someone who really needed it.
What started as a 6 week Christmas project ended as a 4 year non-profit business. We raised over $100,000 in public donations and launched in 4 cities (London, NYC, SF and Bournemouth). This meant we could deliver over 20,000 items to the homeless people in both the UK and America.