Full transcript: Gary Davidge on London Real
4:42 Brian Rose: This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Gary Davidge, manager for the Homeless Dropping Center of the Spitalfields Crip Trust right here in Shortage, London. Every day, you work hands-on helping the homeless community, serving some 6,000 meals to over 500 people last year. In the past decade, you have introduced pre-absidence groups and education programs, and in the next five years, you plan to launch specific programs for women and addiction recovery.
5:08 Brian Rose: Yesterday, myself and the entire team at London Real served Thanksgiving dinner with you, to over 100 people at your drop-in center, with my wife pretty much doing all of the cooking.
5:19 Brian Rose: Gary, welcome to London Real.
5:21 Gary Davidge: Thank you.
5:21 Brian Rose: Thanks for being here, man. First of all, massive thanks for yesterday, man.
5:26 It was really an epic day for us, and I look to you and your whole team for making it all happen.
5:33 Gary Davidge: So thank you, I appreciate that. I think we first spoke in our entire life about a week ago on the phone.
5:40 Brian Rose: That’s right, yeah. And so just to give people some background, I contacted you guys like about eight days ago or nine days ago and said, hey, how would you feel if we helped you put on a Thanksgiving meal?
5:55 It’s a big important holiday for me and my team will help out, and you guys have been doing this work since 1965. I’ve been living in shortage since kind of 09, and I always saw St. Leonard’s Church, which is a big, epic place here in shortage that people don’t know, and I always could see you guys were doing things there. I could see there was a drop-in center and kind of a halfway house where people could live, but I didn’t know much about it, but I also knew there was a homeless community and there was a need, so reached out to you guys.
6:24 At first, I don’t know what you guys thought. Maybe I was a little crazy, but we met and then we made it happen and you passed all these flyers out and yesterday the whole team went over and we cooked and sat down and hung out and spoke with all of these people. And yeah, it was really eyeopening and really powerful for us. So thanks for that.
6:46 Gary Davidge: No, that’s great.
6:47 Gary Davidge: Now for me on my side of it is that the biggest key thing to trying to change homelessness is to get as many people aware the whole situation in the first place, and most people turn on their tellies and they see statistics. But the statistics don’t cut it until you actually sit down with someone, hear a story and realise the situation. And so to have all the used guys come in is brilliant for me because most people won’t just walk in. But when they’re in their comfort zone, they’ve got people that they know are random, people that they work with, they’re doing it together, it’s not so scary.
7:21 And so you leading that with your team is what we need as many people as possible to be doing in order to change the whole viewing society of why someone is homeless. And so all of your guys yesterday, apart from serving us and serving the homeless people and that, they got to experience some lives that some of them that have been changed by the word SC2 has done. Some of them that’s yet to happen, but we hope for that to happen in the future. But definitely for your guys, I hope that their life, their perspective has begun to change about their thoughts and feelings around homeless people.
8:00 Brian Rose: Yeah, very much so. One guy said that he sat and spoke for probably 20, 30 minutes with a guy who had lost a job on Monday and had been homeless since. And he just told everyone here, he said, you know, you’re all three paychecks away from maybe being in a similar situation. And I heard a lot of stories from people there, you know, crazy stories, you know, people that had had big success and now were down on their luck or didn’t have a place to sleep or were struggling with addiction.
8:29 But once you sit down and talk to these people, they’re just, they’re normal people. They’re just in difficult circumstances. And it’s easy to ignore the homeless and to walk by them and to not look at them. So like, this was our chance to kind of really start opening our eyes and having a relationship and trying to understand what’s really going on, you know, as opposed to just thinking it’s, I don’t know, somebody who did something wrong or who doesn’t understand what they should do because there’s a lot more going on here, right?
9:00 Gary Davidge: Yeah, and I appreciate that it’s scary as well, you know, like when you’re walking down the street, you know, I mean, you can turn on your telly every night and then talk about stabbing in London. You know, you hear about random stabbings. And our mindset that’s put to us is almost that, like, there’s people that are mentally ill, they end up on the street, and this is the person that does it. It’s not always the case, but our mindset is still set in that way.
9:28 And so I appreciate that when people walk down the street, it can be scary to make that step to go and speak to someone. But like you experienced yesterday, These are normal people, you know. I’d say like if people have done things in their past, it’s been when they’ve been younger and a lot of these guys that we have in our drop-in are 35 plus, both men and women. And if they’ve done something wrong, they know they don’t want to go down that road anymore because they just don’t see the point in it.
9:59 And actually most of them by this point, they’re now broken people that need help to put their lives back together. And so, you know, the more that we can put that word out, that people just need support and help, and it’s the community that’s got to change that, not just the homeless community, not just people that have been in that position in the past, and definitely not just people that have grown up with similar backgrounds, you know, that people, many of our people that are homeless just need inspiring to believe that they can do more. And until they start seeing other people like them that are inspiring them to do a bit more, that it’s gonna be a struggle for them to believe that they can do it.
10:43 But I’ve seen plenty of potential within many homeless people, and they can easily be someone that can inspire others, but they need to start believing for themselves as well.
10:54 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, I gave my speech up on the stage. First of all, I gave a horrible rendition of the Thanksgiving story with the pilgrims going on, the Plymouth Rock and the Native Americans, which I had to study on YouTube. But I did that and I was explaining, I was talking to everybody at the table and telling them.
11:15 But then I told about my story of struggling with addiction and overdose and how I moved to London to actually change my life. So London kind of saved me and how I’d been clean from heroin for coming up on 17 years and sober from alcohol almost two years. And then some of the guys came up to me afterwards, they were like, what are you, what? That’s you, but look at you. Look at you, you couldn’t have done that.
11:38 And I was like, yeah, of course. But I was in a bad mindset around bad people and I couldn’t see a way out, you know? And so it was nice to talk to them about that, you know?
11:50 Gary Davidge: Yeah, no, that’s great. Just to just, you could just see a lot of eyes open up.
11:55 Brian Rose: And something you told me when I went to visit the center before we went there, is you said, Brian, this, people come in here and we pass out the croissants and the coffees and the teas and the meals, we’re trying to start a conversation. And that can take months to build trust to even get someone’s name. But that’s how maybe you get someone to talk about what’s going on. You said 83 to 90% people are suffering from addiction to something. And maybe people can talk about wanting recovery if they want it and next steps.
12:24 So like I told my whole team there, I said, we got to go there. We’re not there just serving meals. We’re supposed to talk to people because maybe that’s the start of their recovery. But I didn’t realize that till you told me, you know?
12:37 Gary Davidge: Yeah, and that’s why like, you know, we potentially could have done that meal with five or six of us, you know?
12:43 But yeah, the whole point is not just we chuck out another meal. We give meals four days a week on our normal week. And I’m really, we’re giving meals to draw people in because they’re hungry, right? But then from then, our whole purpose is How can we get their lives moving on? How can we get them into pre-absidence class?
13:03 How can we get them along to doing an art class where we have an art therapist in there? How can we get along to women’s class? How can we get them into a smaller group where we can actually have a meaningful conversation? You know, and most of our meaningful conversations, almost all of them, do not happen when we’ve got 50 people in a room having a food and talking, but we want to deal with their basic needs, but also we want to get them on benefits where we can in order to be able to get them into accommodation, in order to progress them maybe into abstaining from whatever their addiction is, and then get them into work placements and get them into a job that, you know, our strap line is putting lives back together.
13:52 I think has dropped mine should be putting lives together because some people a lot of people that I have Experience within the dropping. I’ve never had a life that I would call a life So to say to put it back, I don’t want them to have what they had before I want them to have what I’ve got now, you know, I don’t want them to have a crappy life where You know where they may not be in addiction But the rest of their family is and they don’t want to see their family anymore because this is situation and I want them to be able to go and get a good job where they can earn a salary. It means they ain’t got to stress out every day.
14:29 They’re not having to go and work 12 hours a day in order just to put bread on the table. I want them to have a fulfilled life.
14:36 Brian Rose: How much of this stuff comes from childhood trauma and then sometimes that can lead to addiction and then that can lead to homelessness and hopelessness. And then pretty soon you don’t know where one starts and the other ends. I was speaking with some of, like your CEO and some of the other guys in the management and they were like, oh, you’ve had Dr. Gavormate on and he talks a lot about trauma causing addiction.
15:00 I mean, you must see this in all the stories, right?
15:03 Gary Davidge: Yeah, us, do you know what? We’ve, I can tell you them without saying names, we’ve got one guy who grew up in care. His mom had an overdose when he’s a child. His dad was never about, his sister had an overdose when he was about 13.
15:18 She was only 18 at the time and he has struggled his whole life, because this is a situation and now he’s doing reasonably well right at this moment. He’s not coming into the drop room. We communicate by text and he’s doing okay. But this is the first time in his 43 years, I think it’s the first time that he’s made that step to be abstinent from the things that he struggled with. But another guy who fell out of a window when he was two years old.
15:51 His dad dropped him out of a window onto his head when he was two years old. I didn’t know his name for about five years. He just went by an alias. And that alias was given to him because when he was fell out of the window, it was because the police came in and he tried to shoot the police. His dad tried to shoot the police.
16:11 And in the process of that, he dropped his child out of the window onto his head. Now, if you’re growing up and you’ve got a head injury from the age of two. You’re both your parents are addicts. You’re not really had much. You spend half your time in care and out of care, you know?
16:27 I probably don’t know the full story of how bad it got, but just that in itself is enough to think to yourself. If that’s me, am I any different? You know, do I see that all of that stuff happened to me? But yeah, I grew up into, you know, running, working in a good place where I can earn enough money to not have to stress out about other stuff or do I see myself in exactly the same position. And I think for the majority of people that have that story, you know, no matter what walk of life they’re coming from, it would be very hard for them to say, no, I would have thrived in that still. I’d still be where I am, even if that was my upbringing.
17:09 Brian Rose: And like you said, it’s like, it’s on every, where every person that walks in the door, there’s something, you know?
17:17 Gary Davidge: And there are very few cases where people come in and say, I had a really good life, everything was going well for me, and then I just decided to start doing this. It’s just, but that’s not to say it doesn’t happen, that’s just the people that I see. Because the people that does happen for, people that find themselves in addiction, know, their situation has been on the face of it quite cool and crusty. They don’t come by dropping because they still have that family support. The people that had a good family support growing up still have that family support, even when they’re in the middle of their addiction and when they came through it. And that’s the big difference. For many of my guys, there is one of them saying, never had that family support. And for, like I said to you before, the vast majority of people that are dabbling in addiction are white-collared staff in the city, but most of them, they have supportive families around them.
18:16 They know what it is to be what society considers normal. And so they have a working relationship with their addiction.
18:23 Brian Rose: Yeah, well, one of the guys came up to me and said, how’d you stay out of jail with your addictions? And I kind of looked at him. That’s why this was such a great day for all of us tomorrow, because I really got to understand this other side.
18:37 And I thought, well, why would I be in jail? And then I thought about it. It was because I had something still. I had a support structure. I could still manage to find a job.
18:47 I still maybe had some little money in the bank, but I wasn’t that low. And that’s what kept me in a jail. But to him, he was just like, for me, that’s my option. When I get addicted, I’m in jail because that’s what it leads to. So yeah, you’re totally right.
19:02 And you said something to my whole team when we got there yesterday. And you talked about addiction and drugs and how it related to the people that are gonna come into the drop-in and the rest of the people in London. And I was wondering if you could explain your perspective on that.
19:18 Gary Davidge: Do you mean when I said about the percentage of people on the street using drugs are the vast minority of people that are actually using drugs? Is that what you’re talking about?
19:28 Yeah, well, first of all, what is the percentage of the people that are using drugs And how does that play out? And then, yeah, what’s that perspective about the rest of the population? Because it’s a good perspective, or however you want to tell it.
19:46 Gary Davidge: Yeah, so when I’m talking openly in a forum like that, I can talk openly about my own feelings around it. And I can tell you stuff that I’ve heard.
19:57 When I talk on camera right now, I like to be a bit more, Like, this is where you can find this statistic and stuff like that. So if we talk about 83% of people on the street have some form of addiction, you can find that evidence on a homeless link that’ll have a file there and it’ll show you the percentage of people with addiction. I’m not sure where you’d find the percentage of people, but my understanding, as always, for more recent times that. It’s like one in five of people that are addicts are on the street and that the four in five are wearing white-colored jobs in the city.
20:37 And that kind of makes sense if you think about it because the 14 pound to buy two shots of crack and heroin is not sustaining the drug dealer.
20:46 Brian Rose: Is that what it costs?
20:48 Gary Davidge: That’s what it costs in Tamless at the moment. It’s the cheapest place in Britain. Tower Hamlets.
20:54 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s the cheapest place in Britain.
20:56 Gary Davidge: Yeah, so Hackney is a bit more money, but not much more money for that.
21:00 Brian Rose: Okay, and what do you get for 14 pounds?
21:02 Gary Davidge: I say that you go and get two and two. So if you pick up a phone, to be honest, if you went to any phone box in this area, press redial and ask for two and two, that’s what you’re getting.
21:12 Brian Rose: Serious.
21:13 Gary Davidge: Yeah, so the price might change, but, you know, that’s what you’d get in the phone.
21:18 Brian Rose: And I would get two hits of?
21:20 Gary Davidge: Crack and two of her and yeah.
21:22 Brian Rose: So I get four four hits.
21:24 Gary Davidge: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and then I want to be to shoot and the crack would be to smoke Yeah, and in the you know, like Not for people at home to be trying this but the crack kind of like Tails off the come down. So it just prolongs the So that you don’t have a massive up and then straight down again Okay, the crack does that with heroin does that crack does that now?
21:49 They’re gonna take you high and then straight back down and the crack kind of fills it out a little bit. And yeah, and it makes sense because, you know, like the people that’s got the money are in the city, right? So for some people, I’m not saying for all people, but for some people to lose three, five, even 10 grand in a week, for some people it’s not a big thing, you know? And so that’s where you’ve got, That’s where the money is, if you’re a dealer type thing.
22:20 Brian Rose: And so the homeless people aren’t supporting the dealers?
22:25 Gary Davidge: They’re obviously supporting them, but not to the same extent. My clients are the corner shop, and in the city, the test goes on, the waitress, it’s the big business. And so you always try to remind people that it’s not a homeless phenomenon, it’s a human phenomenon.
22:46 Brian Rose: Yeah. And yet we look at the homeless and say that looks like a drug addict. Yeah.
22:52 Gary Davidge: And point at them and they look like it when in fact it’s all around us. Even us sometimes. And society doesn’t accept this you know like when we had Charles Kennedy who’s a liberal democrat leader a number of years ago passed away due to alcohol abuse mostly. You know it was very sad and people are like, oh look how sad this is and blah blah blah. But then when you hear two people every day are dying in Britain through homeless on the street, you know, just pass us by, you know, there’s no minute silence, there’s no talk in the newspaper, no nothing, you know. But you know, if we were to find out tomorrow that, I don’t know, one member with a royal family or a politician has died of an overdose, again, it will be, oh, look at how sad it is and, you know.
23:46 But, you know, from this chair where I sit, you know, where I live and work amongst many homeless people, that’s our daily event, that’s twice a day, you know. And we don’t see anyone saying anything, you know, about every few months. You know, we should all have a minute silence for Joe Bloggs, who was a Hollywood star, and I’m not at all suggesting that it’s not sad, it is. It’s flipping terrible, but no more terrible. No life is worth more than another person’s life, you know?
24:27 Brian Rose: And yet we marginalize the homeless people.
24:30 Gary Davidge: I think that we do.
24:31 Brian Rose: Why is that?
24:32 Gary Davidge: I don’t know, it might be fear. maybe you know for the most cynical maybe it’s We think they that they are less value. They’ve given up or it’s their fault sometimes
24:44 Brian Rose: That’s the big one isn’t it? You know self-inflicted. I think that’s what people think Oh that person should just get a job. How do you feel when someone tells you that about when you drop in people?
24:58 Brian Rose: Why don’t they just get a job?
25:00 Gary Davidge: Yeah, they’re not more than happy if one of my corporates or someone was kind of they should go and get a job I say yeah great well then when should they start that be around on Monday? You want them to do a job give them a job then help them Right that’s not the problem. Yeah, I mean like all right Yeah, I say that tongue-in-cheek, but I mean like if we’re getting people into recovery if people are in a corn house They’ve done their time in a corn house So they’re in recovery now maybe they’re moving on to their move on houses, and they’re trying to plug back into society society. Society needs more businesses, more bosses that are going to say, I’ll take a chance on them. And let’s see people like SCT, other charities that work with homeless and addicted people as well. Let’s see how they can work together with these people. Maybe someone like SCT or other charities, they need to come in and say, if you’re willing to take a chance with these people, then we’re coming once every month, once every six weeks and we’ll do a supervision with them that will maybe integrate something around their addiction.
26:06 Because what does most bosses know about addiction, you know? Some will, you’ll know about it, but most bosses won’t, you know? So maybe that’s something that needs to be looked into as we move forward as a strategy of making this happen, you know? Get the people that know about these things to come and do their part, And also having people take a chance on someone that maybe has a long criminal record, you know?
26:36 Brian Rose: Yeah, let me finish with the drugs.
26:39 Brian Rose: What other drugs do you have to worry about these days? Because there’s all sorts of other ones that come your way. Yeah, and then each one can mess people up and put them in mental states that are hard for you to work with, right?
26:52 Gary Davidge: Yeah, so there’s a lot of synthetic drugs at the moment. So synthetic cannabinoids like spice, black man bar and then you’ve got the crystal meth that in this area at the moment, they call it special.
27:03 And whether it’s purely crystal meth or not, I’m not a hundred cent sure. But you know, when they’ve done tests, I’ve known them to come back with cement in them and other sort of stuff as well. And you’re like putting cement in your veins is not going to, not going to do you any good. And I’m not a hundred cent sure where the people are standing at the moment, but what I do know for a fact is that synthetic drugs, it’s definitely making people get psychosis a lot quicker.
27:34 You know, some people are gonna say they have it in them already, it just brings it on sooner. Other people say, no, it’s just completely because of the synthetic drugs. I don’t know where it is, but either one ain’t good. So yeah, so we’re living in a time when people can make it in their kitchen, you know?
27:54 Brian Rose: And does the homelessness cause the drugs or does the drugs cause the homelessness?
27:59 How does that cycle work?
28:01 Gary Davidge: There’s a combination of all three, really. Like, so we have a lot of Eastern European guys, probably around 40% of our guys are Eastern European. And when they first came here, they came here for work and they were working. They’ve lost their jobs.
28:18 Find themselves on the street. I’m not saying they’re never drunk, they did, but you know, for them the idea is to have a couple of beers, to get their head down, to get a night’s sleep, to go to work the next day if they can find it. But six months later when they’re still not able to rehouse themselves, that two beers ain’t doing it, so now you’re doing seven, eight beers, and then two in the morning to get over the hangover, and you know, and then you’re in full-blown addiction and then you know maybe the bear is you’re drunk and someone offers you something else and you find yourself walking down that road too and I’ve seen that is the vast majority of the guys that I see that don’t have recourse to public funds within that drop-in that’s the road that they take other people it can be mental health that causes that means that they go on to addiction some people are in the middle of an addiction, like we just said, and they have psychosis, they have just a one-off event in their life, but they keep using and it’s not gonna get better.
29:24 And so there are many paths, but what we find is too much of a high percentage of our homeless people have the three strands, they have the homelessness, the mental health, and the addiction. And that’s a hard road to walk, even if you’ve got a good support, which most of them don’t have. And that’s the problem is that every day your self-esteem goes down lower and lower and lower and lower.
29:52 Brian Rose: I mean, I can only imagine until where you probably don’t even know where it is anymore, right?
29:59 Gary Davidge: Yeah, of course.
30:00 Brian Rose: I mean, so say you’re that guy from Eastern Europe who came in, you had some work for a while, you got laid off, you’re still looking for work, but you’re having a few beers, maybe you lose your house and now you’re having more and now six months later, you’ve kind of given up on that and now you’re, and then you do that another six months. I mean, how do you ever get your head back up? You got no social structure. Nobody wants to talk to you.
30:21 You’re not proud of yourself. Then no one wants to hire you. Now you’re addicted. I mean, that’s hard to get out of, man. Yeah, that’s, yeah.
30:31 And then sometimes they have families. They want to see their families, but they don’t want their families to see them the way that they are. Right. So then they don’t see their kids in 10 years is gone. When they think about their kids, they remember in a four year old, their kids are 14 year old feeling wrecked because their dad left them and never came back, you know?
30:53 Gary Davidge: Yeah, a lot of, yeah, a lot of trouble. There is hope, Brian.
30:57 Brian Rose: I know there is, I know there’s hope. And I want to talk about the hope next. You know, there was a Bulgarian guy, you had at the drop-in, I think, the gypsy guy, And my wife’s Bulgarian and my stepdaughter’s Bulgarian.
31:10 I think you told her the story of him. He came over here and you were trying to get him work. But in Bulgaria, the gypsies are like a second class and the guys here at the construction sites wouldn’t help him. But he was helping yesterday, I think. He was always helping.
31:22 Gary Davidge: He was awesome.
31:23 Brian Rose: And I think my wife got really emotional last night and she was just almost in tears. Just seeing that happen and seeing it on the front line and just seeing this guy who was obviously trying really hard, work really hard, and yet just doesn’t have the opportunities. And yeah, I don’t know, she was like interior last night, just to see that inequity and to see that cycle going to where it’s just not gonna be repaired, it’s just, it was hard for her to just see in the front line.
31:52 But it was also really good because this is the reality. So there was already a good point of that day, just so, and my daughter could see that too, because in Bulgaria, they’re just the gypsies, and the gypsies do their own thing, but now she’s getting like, it’s here, she’s like, wow, this is just really an inequity, you know? So what is the solution? You guys are trying to start a conversation with these people. I know the SCT has all these setups and I got shown around by your CEO and you guys have a really smart program.
32:22 I mean, you guys have really thought about this. You’ve got halfway houses and workshops and programs. So what is the light?
32:30 Gary Davidge: Yeah the line from our perspective is that we’re looking forward now and what we’re trying to do is so over the next five years we would like to see maybe having ten apartments you know not not necessarily we’d own them but you know we’d be able to put the most needy people into these apartment maybe they’re in the middle of addiction in the middle of mental health but we’re given their own space you know you put someone in a hostel and what happens is is you could that the crack dealer next door, it doesn’t work.
33:02 Costal system doesn’t work for the most difficult situations. But if we’re able to then, it’s called the housing first and that’s what we’re looking towards, developing something around that sort of model where we give someone an apartment, give them the wraparound care, we start engaging them, and when they’re ready, they start to make their steps. But giving them stability, you know, so that they ain’t got to worry about the next door neighbor coming in and supplying them with any drugs.
33:32 And if it ends up being women in that sort of situation, it’s not gonna be men next door that are gonna pimp them out or anything like this. And that’s one solution that we’re looking to try and develop over the next five years. And then the other one is we would love to have something like what you’ve seen in Acorn House where we have 16 beds for men that are absolute. We’d love to have something like that for women. Because right now,
33:56 Brian Rose: and that’s your facility right there on Shortage High Street, right?
34:00 Gary Davidge: That’s right, yeah. And there’s 16 places, but you have to be abstinent to be there. Absolutely. But it’s men only. Men only.
34:07 Brian Rose: And it’s got a really cool community center on the ground floor.
34:10 Gary Davidge: That’s right, yeah.
34:11 Brian Rose: You can learn how to cook, you can learn IT services, you can do woodworking. Yeah. It’s really- A lot of therapeutic stuff happened in there as well.
34:17 Brian Rose: Good vibe going on there. Yeah. So that’s good, but you’re saying you’re missing that step before that, where someone can, and as a facility family.
34:27 Gary Davidge: I think that because everybody is different, you will know, like, I don’t know how you got your recovery, but some people will get recovery because they just go, right, I’m stopping and that’s it. And we’re going to, some people use an AA type 12 step model.
34:43 Some people will use CBT. Some people use a combination of many different kinds of therapy and do a 12 step. And so there’s no one size fits all in recovery. So when we’re talking about these apartments that someone would have and would support them through housing benefit and then, you know, we’d have to fundraise ourselves in order to provide that wraparound care, this is just another way of doing the same thing. This is a way maybe someone who just thinks rehab and abstinence is, I can’t do it.
35:19 But if we give someone a bit of stability, if we start wrapping around that care, if If we’re checking in with them every day, if we are meeting with them, maybe in the beginning, two, three times a week, if we’re linking them in with other stuff happening in the community, that’s not all around homelessness and addiction. You know, just, I don’t know, it could be a community center, it could be a religious group or whatever, you know. And they get to see normal people, if you like, you know.
35:46 That’s the way we’d see it, right? People that are not like our clients, where addiction isn’t at the forefront of everything.
35:53 Brian Rose: That’s important, right? Because otherwise it’s just surrounded by addicts, addiction, people talking about addiction all the time. I mean, that could be a grind.
36:01 Gary Davidge: Yeah. I mean, I believe that that’s the case. Yeah. And I’ve seen plenty of people that have got recovery. And from all walks of life, I mean, not just the S.E.T. in my own life as well, I have experienced people, some that have just stopped themselves, gotten themselves involved in a community group and then gone on to get recovery.
36:23 Other people have needed a rehab. Some people have done the same sort of thing that we’re talking about now, where there’s an apartment that they get, they’re wrapping around care, but they’ve got their own apartment, a safe place that they go back to at the end of the night. And so, you know, all doors need to be wedged open with a crowbar in order to get people into recovery, to get people to have a life that we all want, even if we can’t admit it in the middle of our chaos.
36:55 Brian Rose: And you mentioned women. When I went to see you last week, you said that’s a rapidly growing percentage of the homeless population.
37:02 Gary Davidge: It has been a massive area. It’s women and young people.
37:05 Brian Rose: First, talk about women.
37:06 Gary Davidge: Why? So my understanding is that when the law was changed in Britain around squatting rights. So they changed a lot. You can no longer squat in residential properties. My understanding is that when that happened, a lot of women that would be on the street were squatting in residential places.
37:28 And then in a quick period of time, the women who were now squatting in residential places were no longer able to do that. And so they ended up on the street. So then you started to see a larger percentage of people on the street were women. And that presents its own problems. Yeah, I mean, yeah, so I went to a conference where there was a lady who had been working with women for 25 years, so in 25 years she had never met a woman that hadn’t been abused on the street.
38:02 And her words were that when a woman’s on the street they make a choice, do I wanna be abused by one man or do I wanna be abused by lots of men? And so, you know, I’m not involved in the women’s group because I’m a man. It’s not going to provide a safe place for them if I’m not going to be unsafe from there, but it’s not going to help them to open up from there because the perpetrator is a man usually. Not always, but usually. And so we run a women’s group and we, you know, my staff has three women on my staff of four of us.
38:39 Us, and that’s deliberate because for generations for, you know, droppings like ours go back hundreds of years, you know, back to the Victorian times, and it’s primarily in the past being men and now all of a sudden it’s women. So we need to invest more to try and reach these women because the men already know and they come, and they’re already coming, you know, I can maintain something where the women in my team, they’re trying to develop something and it always needs that extra help to develop something rather than to maintain something. And so that’s where we are at SCT in regards to how we’re reaching women and it’s always evolving. We’re always trying to change. We’re always trying new things. It doesn’t work today, but the same thing might well work in six months and we’re not closed to people coming and saying, have you tried this?
39:35 And I’ve said to people, we’ve tried that, but let’s try it again, you know? Because it might work a second time.
39:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, and what about young people?
39:45 Gary Davidge: So young people, there was also, there was a change in the law around benefits. So under 25, it’s very difficult to get housing benefit.
39:55 If you’re under 35, it’s kept at a much lower rate. We’re also living in a time when if you go on a private sector, which is pretty much where anyone’s got a rent now, I think they said it’s like £775 a month is what the average price for a single room in Rand Shoreditch area is. And the housing benefit is not going to cover half of that, especially for under 25s. And so how are we going to find something, because there’s no shortage of people to take up these rooms.
40:35 So we’re asking landlords to take less than half the amount of rent for a more risky person who may well smash up their room. And we’re asking them to do that for half the amount of money. And sometimes we’re asking them not to take a deposit. No one’s going to do that. It’s very difficult.
40:55 Brian Rose: So then where do these people end up?
40:58 Gary Davidge: A guy at the moment is 22 and he is part of a scheme that he got onto and just a local couple have got a spare room and they’ve taken him in. They’re not getting anything for it, but they’ve taken him in, but had that scheme not existed then he would be on the street, 22 years old, no family, vulnerable person on the street. You know, I see it all the time where I live, you know. The drug dealers often put the 14-year-old on the corner while they’re at the other end of the road on another corner, just keeping the knife.
41:41 Because they know the police come past the 14-year-olds getting a caution, they’re not getting anything. But if there’s any trouble, they come down the roads and they’re sort of out of trouble because they’re a 35-year-old man who’s tooled up, you know? You see, I’ve seen 10, 12, sometimes 15 of these young boys and girls just in my neighborhood, standing on the corner, selling drugs. You know, I’m one positive to the other one. I got caught last week, you take it.
42:13 Brian Rose: How do you feel about drug dealers? Does that make you mad?
42:19 Gary Davidge: Yeah. To start with, yes, but at the same time, they’re often the same people that I’m working with, you know, what does a 22-year-old do? You know, he’s on the street.
42:34 Why can’t I get up and just do that? You know, I’ve got a friend whose son has been to prison already for doing that. Comes out of prison. How else is he gonna make 600 pound a day? That’s what he was doing.
42:49 And now you’re trying to tell that person, Your reform now, go work in Tesco’s for £40 a day. I’ve been talking about it for three hours and get 600 quid. Why am I going to work in Tesco’s? The mentality needs to change. We need more education for the young people.
43:06 You know, where we work, in the TAB Centre, they also run a young people’s thing, trying to help these young people. And the funny thing is, I’ve met some of the young people, I’ve done a talk for some of the young people, and in fact, they’re in the children, and so I’ve just ran a quarter from my ass. I see them all the time in the fish and chip shops. Selling stolen mobile phones and all sorts of stuff. So I often say to people, and I say to the guys that work in the same building, I say to them, if you don’t sort them out now, I’ll have to sort them out in 20 years when they come through my door, you know?
43:41 Brian Rose: Should we legalize drugs? Because this is all part of the same problem. I mean, isn’t it? Should we legalize drugs?
43:49 Gary Davidge: So the last place to do that, I believe, was Portugal.
43:52 Brian Rose: Yeah, I guess you’ve looked into it. They’ve decriminalized it, yeah. They said it had some changes.
43:57 Gary Davidge: There’s a big difference. My understanding is there’s a big difference between Portugal and Britain.
44:02 There’s a family unit there. And so I’ve spoken to a couple of Portuguese guys, said, yeah, when they did that, what happened is every parent went, see them on the corner, you’re staying well away from them because this is what happens. If you legalize drugs in this country, I believe what’ll happen is, there’d be no family unit in your urban areas that are gonna tell them not to do this. It may work, it may not. Now, there’s another scheme that was in the Wirral back in the early 90s, and that really worked, you know?
44:35 So I think within reason to legalize it, possibly within a clinic setting, within a engagement setting, but to just say, walk into your corner shop and buy a heroin or crack, and we attacked it. I don’t believe, that’s the way forward.
44:51 Brian Rose: No, that’s probably not good for us. And potentially clinics where you can get on subscription or something like this. Yeah, well there’s that and then there’s, in Portugal they just decriminalized it, so it’s like the people buying don’t get prosecuted.
45:08 Yeah. And then there’s this whole thing where you have clinics where people can go in and shoot up, they do this in Scotland now, they just open one where they give them pharmaceutical grade heroin, but you have to come in and shoot up there and they can watch you there so you don’t overdose. But there’s a lot of people that think that’s completely insane. That someone can come in and get free pharmaceutical grade drugs, but they don’t see the knock on HIV, all the other deaths that also not only cause death, but also mess up the NHS.
45:39 Brian Rose: So, you know, you see all of this.
45:42 Gary Davidge: Yeah, so what you said there is absolutely right. But in the sense that they think that it’s crazy, right, they think that it’s not right, that it’s insane. But that’s the reason that it’s, the whole thing is crazy and insane, right? Like whatever word you want to use, but like why would someone use drugs full well knowing that it’s going to wreck their life?
46:08 That’s insanity, you know? So when people are saying we shouldn’t do that, that’s not right, blah, blah, blah. I agree with them that it’s not right and it’s insanity, but at the same time, does it make it wrong from the position where we’re standing right now? Because the position where we’re standing right now is two people every day are dying on the street. I wouldn’t be surprised if come when they release the next quote of people come next October time that we’re talking about that number being two and a half, three people dying every day for the year 19 to 20, or I wouldn’t be surprised.
46:49 In my dropping, I’ve seen 12 people die since June. And normally we would see 12 people die in a year, but we would see eight to 10 of them people die from the end of October to the end of March. So if we’ve seen 12 just over the summer, then I fully expect that number to be 25, maybe more come April, which is double what we’ve been seeing. So the whole thing is insane, you know, like nothing is, nothing is, nothing is right. No, I don’t debate with people what they’re saying, oh, that’s insanity, getting them to do this.
47:29 I don’t debate that, but at the same time, but surely it’s not right also to just let people die on the street.
47:38 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah. Why is it doubling? Why are more people dying, do you think?
47:43 Gary Davidge: I mean, you know, lots of people are scared, I think, you know, I think lots of people are scared.
47:51 There’s a lot of hope lost, you know, like the cost of living is going up for everyone. And people are so unsure. There’s never been so much apathy around politics and all like, but it’s happening, not happening. We don’t know. Do we trust any politicians?
48:18 People have always had a sceptical about politicians, but I mean, not like now. I can never remember in my adult life people feeling so apathetic about politicians and stuff that no one trusts anyone. I think if you ask most people, they don’t know who they’re even going to vote for on the 12th. They want something to change, but they don’t know how. They want there to be hope, but there doesn’t seem to be.
48:47 You know, more and more synthetic drugs coming in. The second you ban one drug, they just slightly change it. And now that’s a legal high. Then you ban that one, and by the time you’ve done that, there’s another 10. They’re almost exactly the same.
49:04 You change it a little bit, it’s no longer illegal. So there’s lots of reasons why, and the more that people that are out of work, the more people that don’t have stable upbringings, the more, it just grows, you know?
49:21 Brian Rose: Yeah. Are we seeing these synthetic fentanyls and a lot of these super high potency opioids coming out of China and that kind of thing as well? I know in America that’s a big problem.
49:35 Gary Davidge: I think that it’s a growing problem. I remember back in maybe 2014 and I went for a drug awareness course and I was talking about crystal meth and all these other things. And they were talking, oh, we haven’t really seen it here yet. And then like 2015, 16, just like everybody was talking about it. And I’m, we were doing this awareness course so like, if we begin to see it And then all of a sudden, it was just here.
50:07 And every drug user knew about it. I’d used it. Some had decided they were old school and they wasn’t gonna use it. And even some of them now using it because for whatever reason, bigger, higher, maybe it’s cheaper at the time. Maybe they didn’t even know when they first got it.
50:24 Maybe they paid the same amount and they were in the middle of clucking and this was what came to hand for whatever reason, and now it’s here and it’s upon us. And yeah, I don’t know how we tackle it, you know?
50:43 Brian Rose: Are we ever gonna solve the problem of homelessness?
50:47 Gary Davidge: I don’t believe we’ll ever solve the problem. My personal thing is that I think we need to do all we can to give everyone the option.
50:59 We can’t just end homelessness. It’s just, it’s just not gonna happen. People got to want to end certain things. So there are people I offer them hostels, but they refuse them because that they want to be able to use in their hostels, not allowing them to. Now there’s nothing wrong with the hostel, you know, sometimes, but people have still got to make their choices.
51:27 But we need to educate from the bottom up. You know, like we need to make sure that this list of purple where people are using is not growing to our next generation. We need to try and not just offer hope but give opportunities to the children that are growing up in care, the people that have got parents that are in the middle of addiction. There are some children, teenagers, where we just need to really help them to understand and to show them there’s something other than this.
52:05 Give them hope. And that’s not where SCT is at, but there needs to be other charities out there doing this. And that’s where your first change has got to be. And that’s at SCT, our job is, let’s help the guys that are in the middle of it. Let’s move along the process, let’s help them to not be 10 years away from their children because they don’t want their children to see their addiction, let’s get them into recovery, let’s get them helping them to be proper fathers or mothers to their children.
52:38 Even if they’re in care and they get the time to see them, to show them, I’ve changed, don’t go down this road, because they’re going to listen to people like them. We can shoot people in, we could get the, I don’t know, back in the day maybe we could have got Charles Kennedy in to talk to people about alcoholism, but maybe they’re not gonna listen because he’s not from the same background as them. Some people will. My wife always says you don’t have to break your leg to know how to fix it.
53:09 The doctor’s trained, he knows how to fix it, but maybe he’s never broken your leg. And that’s the same for some people. They’re still gonna listen whether you’ve been in the middle of that addiction. But some people won’t. And so we need to have, you know, horses for courses.
53:24 Brian Rose: What should we do if we see a homeless person and they ask for money? What do you tell people to do?
53:31 Gary Davidge: So there is, there’s an app on the phone you can get. It’s called My Next Meal.
53:36 Brian Rose: My Next Meal, okay.
53:37 Gary Davidge: Yeah, it’s at mynextmeal.com, I think it is. So I’ll say to people, you can have that app on your phone. Someone asking you for money. Encourage, find out where it is. encourage them to go to that place, because it doesn’t need to be us.
53:52 But if they go to a drop-in center, first of all, they get fed, but then hopefully they build a relationship with one of the workers, and then workers can then help them get engaged with the local addiction recovery service, get them engaged in with the hostels, with night shelters, with rehabs if they need to be. And if we give a sandwich to someone sitting outside Tesco’s, it means he’s got a sandwich to eat and he can sit there begging to make his money for his drugs. Now, people need to make their own choice on whether they want to facilitate someone taking drugs.
54:31 And some people say, look, I gave my money and he can go and use it on drugs. That’s not my place to say whether that’s right or not. People have their own morals on that. But what I would say is when you’re giving someone money, more than 90% of that time, money is going on drugs or drink. So don’t think that you’re giving them money for a sandwich or not. So now you’re in a position if you’re listening to this to make the choice. Do I want to give him money for drugs or does he want food then I’m going to send him to a centre or her to a centre where they can go and get this support. The second thing you get another app is a street link app.
55:07 You can then report that this person is homeless in this place and an outreach worker will come and find them, then that way they, again, start getting on the road to getting housed. And there are other occasions where I would say to you, if you’ve looked on your app, there is no place open until the morning, it’s six o’clock at night, buying a sandwich. There’s big people that want to give grace to people. So buying a sandwich, maybe they are hungry. but they’re hungry and they ain’t gonna eat till tomorrow morning.
55:44 But you know, you’ve got them two steps first. You’ve got your street lane cap, you’ve got your My Next Mill app, and if you send them in to me at SCT, I will do all that I can to help them.
55:56 Brian Rose: That’s really good advice, man, I appreciate that. You guys have something on your website called Recovery Capital, and you break things down into social capital, physical capital, human capital, and cultural capital, and maybe it’s worth telling people kind of What that means, because I think maybe it shows what you’re trying to do with someone when they come to your door and maybe potentially end up back in society somehow.
56:23 Gary Davidge: Yeah, I think like around recovery capital is a lot of what we’ve been talking about. So we want to take the person for who they are but then we also want to encourage them. We want to add humanity to, you know, for many people that have been on the street in the middle of addiction, they’ve lost their humanity. They’ve been degraded. So it’s about building that capital up.
56:51 It’s about helping that person to realize they’re not the person that, at this moment maybe, that they think that they are. So we’re giving them capital. We’re teaching them what we’re trying to in the way that we live our life, but also in food discussion, helping them to realize
57:14 That they are a person just as valuable as the next person. But they’ve got to start believing that. And when they start to believe in that they are, more than what they are believing at this moment, that’s when you start building up your capital. They start believing that they’re capable. You know, they get into the art group and start doing a bit of art and they realize they’ve got something to express.
57:35 They’ve got something to give back to life as well. So you’re building up the humanity. You’re also building up the other parts that you’ve been talking about there. And one of the big things that I think we’ve seen over the last 10 years is that this whole impression of, oh, you’re a man, man up, all of this sort of stuff. I said, load of crap, mate.
58:00 This is why people end up in the middle of addiction. So being able to tell them, you can talk with someone. So we have trained counselors who will cancel people. And that too is giving back to that person. And everything that they’re building on their lives, whether it’s educational, whether it’s therapeutic, just giving someone a house, all of these things are creating capital in their life.
58:26 Something that they can build on, giving them equity.
58:30 Brian Rose: Super powerful, man. And it brings them back. One word you’ve mentioned to me, it wasn’t homelessness, it was hopelessness. And I never thought of that before.
58:42 But like, is that the biggest enemy for a lot of these people, the hopelessness of their situation?
58:49 Gary Davidge: Yeah, and I think that that’s the biggest enemy of everything that we’ve got in society, not just if you’re homeless, but even if you’re working hard and you’re a road sweeper And all you can do is meet, meet the needs for today. You know, you can find a hopelessness in that. And hopelessness is only gonna lead you down, you know. Someone who’s hopeless has got their head down.
59:16 They can’t see what’s in front of them. If you give someone hope, their head starts to rise. Your vision starts to see wider than what you are. You know, and that’s the recovery capital. You can’t remember your head down.
59:30 You’re hopeless, you start to raise your head up, and then the potential just grows. Because now you can see the path that you’re coming towards the end of. You’ve got your head down, you walk into path, trip over the curb, and you get it by a bus. When you’ve got your head up, you know that it’s a not a green man, and you can stop, you know, and that’s the beginning of everything, isn’t it? You raise your head up, push your chest out, start to believe, start to get help, start to reach out.
1:00:04 What’s ahead for me? You know, the hope of what’s in front of you keeps you walking as well. No one walks, no one stops at their head, head held high, chest out. You know, you’re going to a restaurant or whatever and then you decide, oh, I’m just stopping. Why are you stopping?
1:00:23 I don’t know, just stopping. You just, you’ve got the prize in front of you. Keep going, you keep going because you can see it. And that’s where you need to get to. You need to get for a place where people can see what’s in front of them, something to thrive for, something to live for, something to make a change.
1:00:44 Brian Rose: Yeah, I was saying yesterday at the Thanksgiving celebration, like what we usually do at Thanksgiving is I make everybody go around the table and say something they’re thankful for. It’s interesting to do even at a dinner party because a lot of people don’t know what to say or they feel really weird. But once they say it, they realize that I got up so much to be thankful for. And I kind of asked a few people to do it yesterday. I don’t know if they did it, but even just that little piece of gratitude to say, wow, I’m grateful to be able to taste this pumpkin pie, or I’m here today, or I’m listening to this crazy yank, or whatever, you know?
1:01:18 Brian Rose: But that’s sometimes just, that’s a nice start too sometimes, right?
1:01:22 Gary Davidge: And I think this is why, this is one of the things when we come together next year, This is the thing that we can be implementing. I’ll be on the stage, I’ll be introducing you. They’ll listen to me because they know, I’ve been there for nine years, right? They know who I am, they trust me.
1:01:38 When I stand up there and say, this is Brian Rose, he’s come to share a story with you. They’re listening, right? All of them will listen. You’ll always get one or two that I don’t know, but for the vast majority, they’re gonna listen to you then. If we have something on the table from the beginning, explaining something about Thanksgiving, saying, we’re going to share something on the table, more people will be engaging with that.
1:02:01 And these are the small things that I said to you, like, oh, we’ve got a week to organize it. You know, we would have thought about this if we had a bit of water, we would have thought, right, we’re going to do this, we’re going to make sure this happens and that happens. And so, you know, these are the things, you know, that I look forward to in the relationship that we’re building is that we’re going to, this year was good, next year is going to be better.
1:02:23 Brian Rose: Oh, yeah, definitely. We were talking about this morning. We got all sorts of, I call it IP, intellectual property. So yeah, next year, we’re going to have also something at the table so people can kind of engage at the table, maybe like a small game or something, so people can hang out with each other. I kind of like the fact there was an entertainment because that way people could have real conversations.
1:02:41 So I kind of like there wasn’t loud music because that way people could actually chat and people seem to be enjoying the chat. But I agree, also it might be nice to have more of that exercise where people maybe tell each other something they’re thankful for at the table. And I know it might be pushing it a little bit, but maybe not. And just might be some interesting ideas that helped you. I know you in the past, your Christian faith helped you get through some tough times, but we talk about ideas all the time on this show, something called a growth mindset.
1:03:12 The fact that you just admit that you can change your mind as opposed to a fixed mindset, that you can change your talents. Just someone admitting that, oh yeah, I think I can do that. It’s like a big step forward.
1:03:24 Gary Davidge: So yeah, look careful what you started, man. I told the guys that next year we’re gonna put a big marquee over all of the St. Leonard’s Church.
1:03:32 It’s gonna be thousands of people there. Are you ready?
1:03:39 Brian Rose: I will be. I will be.
1:03:41 Tell me about you, man. You’ve been doing this for nine years, you know? What’s, and I know the guys, The guys like you, they trust you, they know you, and that’s why I wanted to have you on today. You know, you’re like the guy, you’re the man of the people there. You understand them, their problems, and they know that, which is a big deal.
1:03:57 How do you keep doing this? I know last week you said, Brian, you know, I lost somebody, somebody died, one of my guys died the other day, and it’s just nice having you coming in here with this energy and thanksgiving, and that’s a nice thing too, because it makes my job, you know, fun in that way too. How do you do what you do every day? And why do you do what you do every day?
1:04:18 Gary Davidge: Yeah, that’s a good question.
1:04:20 So to start with, there are periods where I’m like, your wife was last night, I’m broken. Feels like there’s no, for a moment, you’re in the middle of something where you wander out of way back is, how we get back. And-
1:04:35 Brian Rose: Because it all gets to you sometimes.
1:04:38 Gary Davidge: Yeah, because you lose people that you connect with, and you know them troll people I talked about? You know, four of them I felt really connected to, you know, and it’s difficult, you know, it’s difficult in the middle of that.
1:04:54 You know, one of them, he was housed, and I was going to his house three times a week before or after work, and if I was going in before, I’d go in and I’d chuck him the newspapers. He’d go, Bob, newspapers, he couldn’t move too much, you know, and just chuck him the the newspapers and where they’d have a wind up, they’d have a wind up winding me up about supporting West Ham and winding him up about never seeing Chelsea win another thing. And you connect and then when they pass away, even if you’re expecting it, that’s hard to take in.
1:05:29 But how do we keep going? We keep going for the one, the focus is not on the 12 that’s passed away from June. The focus is on everyone that gets recovery, every person that makes a step. And you need to look to every step that one person makes. So if someone walks in my door, it’s a step.
1:05:54 When we’ve done Thanksgiving, there was plenty of new people. That’s their step, they’ve walked in to our door. That’s a step for them. If they start coming and do gardening come next springtime, they start spending some time and build a relationship with us, that’s a step for them. Maybe they haven’t trusted anyone for years and now they start to build a relationship with us and trust us.
1:06:15 Maybe pre-abstinence group is a step, it’s quite a long step. The pre-abstinence is thinking about abstinence, having conversations about abstinence. Yeah, and often people come into that group and they don’t even know they’re going to be thinking about it because they walk into a group of four people and they’re completely chaotic and I say, come be a part of our community and the guy who’s been there for three months, he knows exactly what the group’s about and the guys just turn their first time, maybe don’t fully understand what’s happening.
1:06:43 And so, you know, someone introduces the group and asks the person who’s been for four months, how their week’s been, and they automatically start talking about their addiction or their recovery even, they could be in recovery for a month maybe. And then that automatically means a person who’s first walked through the door, who’s sitting next to another person who they sit with all the time, who’s now admitting they’re an addict and doesn’t know how to stop, they start to think, am I an addict? If that person is, I’m doing equally as much, and their first thought, the first time that they’ve thought, am I an addict?
1:07:18 That’s a massive step for someone. And then, you know, from there, we try to encourage abstinence for a period of, you know, we’ll try to, for good, but first of all, we’re saying, let’s get through today, let’s get through tomorrow. They’ve been there for a while, Maybe then they start doing weeks at a time. Maybe they’re doing months at a time, you know. And we have people that, you know, they do fall out of the recovery center at Acorn House and they come back to me and it usually takes them a week.
1:07:47 But like if I know they’ve fallen out, I go out and find them. I tell them, come back to the drop-in. But they’re embarrassed. They don’t wanna tell me that they failed. Right.
1:07:57 But it’s not about that. Cause I tell them it’s not about that. It’s about our relationship. We’re friends, right? to come into the dropping and get a sandwich.
1:08:06 Why are you starving on the street when I can give you a sandwich, you know? And I kind of turn it on them to say like, I’m not offended that you did it. I’m not offended that you’ve relapsed. I’m offended that you don’t think that I’m a friend to you that you can come back to me. And when they begin to get that, that’s the change.
1:08:23 That’s, you know, and often it takes four or five times before people get recovery, they’re going to rehab them, not necessarily our one, but through their life. And I think it’s in my role, it’s my responsibility to be a friend to these people, no matter what they do. You know, we had a guy who robbed our office, you know, and then a week later I’m going, I don’t even care, you know, like, whatever. He smashed my computer up, he smashed my window. It was a bit annoying.
1:08:51 It was a day before Prince William come. We were still in the office at 10 at night, cleaning up the office. You know, and then the next week I’m going, Now the important thing is that you get recovery. And I only went back into acorn ass. No, because the important thing, I can replace everything in that office.
1:09:11 I can’t replace a person’s life. So yes, there’s consequences, but often the consequences are more within someone else, within themselves, than any external consequences. They beat themselves up and literally sometimes kill themselves through the addiction, through other things as well. And now that’s what we don’t want. We’re here to be, help and encourage these guys, women and men, to move on.
1:09:44 And that’s where I get my hope from, from every step that I see, from the day that they walk in the drop-in, to the day that they go to gardening, to when they’re in the women’s room. I don’t go in there, but I still get reports back from my staff. And when I hear that Sanso’s doing this or doing that, I’m encouraged, that encourages me, that gives me hope. Hope that we can do this, the hope that people can change. And I’ve seen it so many times that people have changed that I have no doubt that anybody can change.
1:10:13 I have no doubt, but I need to impart that same hope that I have for every individual into that individual as well, so that they can believe. And so often we believe for them until the point that they can believe for themselves. And that’s what we’re all about.
1:10:35 Brian Rose: You still didn’t tell me why you’re doing it.
1:10:39 Gary Davidge: I’m doing it because many reasons.
1:10:42 So one reason is my own faith, yeah. I believe that we’re all made in the image of God. So I believe that it’s important that everyone understands that and knows that. I’ve lost two cousins to addictions, my last one was the year before I lost, it was my closest cousin that I had, he was 34 at the time, just the addiction was too much and when I’d done my triathlon, I was turning 40, and I used to cycle to Lakeside and do a big loop, it’s about 40 miles or something. And he lived out in Dagnum, so I knew I would always come back on a first morning shattered, because going out there I’d kind of give it some, but then coming back was when I would reflect. I don’t know whether your mind just gets title ever and I was doing it like five in the morning anyway so now I’ve remembered my cousin and what it meant to me and the fact that he isn’t here anymore and and it pushed me so I’d get back I’d get back at like six in the morning left the third day’s work and I’d drained everything out of my body so you know this is So I have personal reasons for wanting to see homeless, addicted people have what my cousins don’t have, you know, and my mum also was in addiction before I was born and she’s never gone back on that. And I’ve always said if I can be half of what my mum was to me, to my children, then I will throw that up being a success.
1:12:47 And so, that’s what, as well. There are a few of my drivers to get me to do what I’m doing.
1:12:53 Brian Rose: And you’ve got five kids.
1:12:55 Gary Davidge: I’ve got five kids. So, like I said, I want to try to be half of what my mother’s been to me, to my kids.
1:13:02 Brian Rose: Are they proud of the work you do?
1:13:04 Gary Davidge: They are. My, yeah, we’re talking at the moment, we’re all talking about going to do Great north swim together, up in the lakes. I’m not sure where we’re at with it yet. My wife is just, I’m just kind of like, that means I’ve got to learn to swim properly.
1:13:22 But if that happens, then we will more than likely do it for SCT, like to raise money for them. And yeah, my kids fully aware of what homelessness means homelessness means and what I do and yeah and obviously the older ones so I have my 13 year old twins and one of them’s got learning disabilities so he doesn’t always a hundred percent get it but I think he gets it more than I realize you know sometimes they say we could take this food to the homeless kind of that way. But my daughter fully gets it. She was a, I want to call it a prefect. It’s one of the things that she was raising in the year that she was a prefect. It’s around homelessness and stuff. So she fully gets it.
1:14:14 Brian Rose: I have young boys. They’re three and four now, but I want to bring them maybe next year. I think they need to be a part of this. They need to grow up and see it. My 15-year-old and I think that was important.
1:14:32 She seemed really happy to be there. Isn’t that weird? I felt super grateful to be there. Isn’t that weird? I mean, you know, I wasn’t having lunch, but it was the best Thanksgiving I’ve ever had in my whole life.
1:14:45 Gary Davidge: Oh, that’s great.
1:14:46 Brian Rose: And I wasn’t with family or friends. So, yeah, I felt super grateful just to be a part of it and just be there. And I’ve never done a Thanksgiving where I didn’t have Thanksgiving, you know. I didn’t really eat, but I didn’t really feel like eating.
1:14:58 So it was big, it was powerful.
1:15:00 Gary Davidge: Well, I hope that if our relationship continues and you keep doing Thanksgiving that at some point you will come to think of the people that we have as being at least friends. Because I know when I go on holiday, my wife is waiting and thinking, why are you on the email? And it’s because that the people that I work with, I see as friends. You know, I see them as friends.
1:15:27 I see elements of family members in different ones of them. You know, I feel pain when one of them feels pain. And, you know, I have a staff team that I’ve never had before like this. You know, when we do supervision, when I do supervision with them, I’m their boss. It’s so open, you know, taking real life stuff.
1:15:55 And we are becoming so close knit, and we need that in order to function in the way that we do. If we didn’t have the support that we give each other, it doesn’t work. And I think that’s, I’m experiencing something special at my workplace with the team that I have, that I’ve not experienced anywhere else. And that’s because we all trust each other. And in the last year, we’ve all had significant things happen in our lives that we’ve shared and with openness And being able to share lives together has meant that we are a tight-knit unit of people.
1:16:34 And having that unit and the unity is a real good vision for our homeless people to see. They will never hear us talking badly of each other behind each other’s backs. We always talk positively, and we’re proactive and consistent with all of our service users. And this is how we make change. We show them what change looks like.
1:17:04 And in many ways if they look in, we’re the closest thing they’ve ever seen to a family, a real family, you know? Yeah. That’s what encourages me. That in the last year has been the biggest bringer of hope to me, just seeing. And you know the team members, one’s Bengali, two of them are from Jamaican heritage, and there’s me, a white guy, you know?
1:17:31 You couldn’t be more diverse in many ways as a group of people, but we are connected. We’re connected.
1:17:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, it really showed yesterday, man. Yeah, the experience, you feel it. They say the customer experience is a lagging indicator of the company culture.
1:17:50 So I got the customer experience yesterday and it was, you could tell, you guys were a strong culture. So yeah, throughout. So your team there on the ground and all your management structure and everything was just really solid. So big thanks to the SCT for making all that happen in you as well. Two final questions.
1:18:10 One is, to that homeless person out there that’s watching this, cause I know a lot of people do have mobiles and they’re plugged in and they’re in libraries and they’re watching stuff on YouTube, what’s a step they can make if something you’ve said resonated with them? That’s one question. And the second question for someone who isn’t, who’s watched this, that wants to take the next step themselves, what do they do? So, let’s start off if.
1:18:39 Gary Davidge: Okay, so if there’s a homeless person out there, I would say, first of all, don’t give up.
1:18:45 You may have been to different drop-ins and it hasn’t worked out for you. I’m not gonna say, we’re the best homeless center in the world. And if you come to us, we’re gonna get it right because we still get things wrong. There are people that walk in that door and we didn’t see them the first time because we were too busy, right? But what I do know is if we haven’t seen that person within the first three or four times of them coming in, I believe I’m failing.
1:19:17 I don’t want us to be in that place. I really want to see someone the first time. But don’t give up on the homeless centers because I’ve never met a homeless project worker that got into this business for the money. So they’ve done it because their heart is challenged. They want to do the best that they can.
1:19:35 And even if you’ve had a bad experience of any dropping center, try to give the next dropping center the benefit of the doubt. And these places are about because people want to serve, you know, and so I believe that there’s a lot of love and a lot of care in every drop-in centre. And so that would be my thing is get yourself connected, you know, and try and rationalise things I think because often it’s an emotional response, ah, they’ve never done this for He said, they’re never going to do.
1:20:16 But actually, think about what has happened. Because I’ve had it said of me, oh, Gary hasn’t done this or done that. And then actually, when we sit down and talk to someone, they realize, oh, I have done this, that, and the other. Occasionally, I haven’t. But most of the time, I’ve gone the extra mile, but maybe it didn’t work out.
1:20:34 Maybe I’ve done all I could, but it wasn’t enough because it just didn’t work out. Maybe you didn’t know all the things that I did do. that work it out, go back to the person that maybe you feel has let you down, find out what happened. That would be the first thing, and then the second one was around. People that are watching this that wanna get more involved somehow.
1:20:57 Brian Rose: So volunteering and stuff like that? Maybe, or, you know, yeah, understanding this more, volunteering more, supporting it somehow.
1:21:07 Gary Davidge: Yeah, so I know within SCT, and I think within most drop-in centers, even a crisis and your big ones, your big national corporate kind of homeless places. If you are into your fitness, there’s so many opportunities where you can be part of raising the finance in order to make their projects working. That’s definitely the case at SCT.
1:21:32 We have people that run the marathon, Prudential Ride London, 10Ks, Vitality 10Ks, triathlons, whatever, whatever you’re into and you feel you wanna be a part of that and you feel that maybe you can help benefit the project in achieving your personal goals, then you can do that at SCT. That’d be a brilliant step because like what we said about these apartments to getting the most character people in there, the women’s hostel type thing, these things don’t come cheap if that’s your thing and you wanna make a personal goal, as well as helping the, helping SCT like that, and that’s brilliant. And we’d love to if you come down.
1:22:18 The other thing is, we often have events through the summer within the drop-in. And if you’re working up in the, wherever you’re working, you come down with your colleagues, put on a barbecue with us. And that really helps to break a bit of the stigma around homelessness because you could get 10 of your colleagues involved in running a barbecue or a shop challenge or doing a bit of gardening as part of the recovery hub. And you get to work together, it’s a good team building event, but also you get to break some of the stigmas around homelessness addiction and stuff like that.
1:22:58 And that’s also a really great way of being able to support SCT in the local area, being there in Shoreditch.
1:23:07 Brian Rose: Good stuff, man. It’s good advice. Do we miss anything? Anything else?
1:23:12 Anything you want to tell, anything else you want to say?
1:23:16 Gary Davidge: I don’t know, just, just the, you know, like if you’re one of these people that’s out there and you’re feeling negative around politics, Brexit, whatever, you know, there’s hope. There’s people like us out there, you know, that are trying to make a difference. When I say, yes, I’m in, you’re there, you delivered the Thanksgiving meal. We’re here, you know, all year round trying to support and help people that need that extra support and help.
1:23:45 So be encouraged, there’s help, you know, and more people can step forward like you are. And it might not be your whole life to dedicate to the homeless or to addiction, but maybe it’s a part of your life. Maybe it’s bringing a group of people down and making them more aware of homelessness, you know. Make changing our society a part of your life is what I would say.
1:24:12 Brian Rose: It’s really good advice, man.
1:24:14 Thanks for yesterday. It was pretty epic, the whole thing. And the fact that you guys kind of trusted us to do it, because I know it was a lot of trust for you, because you had to tell your members it was going to happen, you had to make sure it was going to happen. And I know it was a crazy idea with like little notice, but thanks for the trust. I really meant a lot.
1:24:31 And we had an amazing time doing it. And I felt like I was in some type of a time warp when I was there for like three hours. I felt like three days. And when I went out to rest the world, it felt weird. And I connected with so many people.
1:24:44 I shook so many people’s hands, heard so many people’s stories. The whole team like loved it. They were all super engaged. I’ve never seen them work so hard as in your kitchen. And just engaging with everyone.
1:24:57 Everybody had a story. Everybody was passing out fliers before that, talking to people on the streets. And I think it’s changed our relationship with the homeless community here, which is big. I think we’re now looking differently at these people and trying to understand these people. And now we know these apps and we know that they’re drop-in centers and we know where to point people and that’s super helpful.
1:25:18 So yeah, big thanks to you and your whole team, all the management, everybody was really helpful and showed me everything you guys do. Big thanks to my wife for doing all the cooking and making me look good. She just took it on and literally bought all the groceries and cooked all the turkeys and just did everything. It was crazy. And making it happen.
1:25:38 Second annual is coming next year. So that’s happening, so get ready. We’ll have a lot more time to repair and we’ll be better at it. So looking forward to that and just thank you, Gary. Really appreciate your vibe.
1:25:50 And right away, I knew this was something we wanted to do with you. And yeah, also thanks for doing this work day in and day out for the last nine years. And it’s it’s hard work and you don’t get the recognition probably you deserve so hopefully we can give you a little bit today So thanks for that and thanks for the team and really saw everybody was really warm and really helpful And I can see how you guys gel minutes. It’s a good setup. So thank you. There you go, man All right, so we’ll put links down below SCT is is the place they can google that is sct.org. You care something like that. Yes okay so people can find that for the links but yeah definitely get involved with this check out one of the drop-in centers and we’re doing Thanksgiving next year so if you want to get involved with that email us and if you’re out there come join us for that next year I know put it in your calendar next year but it’s gonna be great and that’s it man thanks for coming on drop in science man
1:26:19 Gary Davidge: all right thanks boy
