April 15, 2016

For immediate release

Social Entrepreneur launches Pledge Me campaign to survey the homeless

Social Entrepreneur and Living Wage employer James Crow, known best for his co-founding of Fairtrade ice block company Nice Blocks and dairy free milk business Little Island Coconut Creamery, has today launched a social initiative to survey all homeless people living in New Zealand. And the kicker? He’s going to crowd fund it.

Crow formed the social initiative Gimme Shelter three years ago after a friend approached him for some advice. She had been helping a young man who was sleeping rough in central Auckland and she wanted to know if he had any ideas on how they could collectively do more to help the greater issue. Crow went away, looked at the bigger picture and found that besides hardworking and under resourced front line services, there was nothing tangible he could see being done that either politicians could champion or the public could rally to.

“I spent the first six months just asking questions of anyone I could. I sat with multiple Auckland based services like the Auckland City Mission, Lifewise, Salvation Army and on a few council led meetings. What I gathered early on was this was an issue around lack of resources and information,” says Crow.

Crow could see many similarities between the social issue of ending homelessness and the forming of the business he co-founded with friend Tommy Holden in 2010 and which has grown to a $3m a year company in just five years.

“When Tommy and I began we could see that support and investment wasn’t going to come our way without good data on the opportunity and a solid plan.”

What Crow sees within the homeless sector is that good data is lacking and this in turn affects everything downstream, including policy, funding and public engagement.

How big a problem are we talking about here?

It’s estimated* that in 2006 there were as many as 5,000 people sleeping rough in New Zealand. With population growth, the Christchurch earthquakes and housing shortages this figure could now be in the range of 6,700 people: “but it could be far greater. We just don't know. And if we don't have the data, NZ can't find and allocate resources appropriately,” says Crow.

Gimme Shelter intends to find out through the creation of a mobile phone app that will allow any member of the public or community group to survey a rough sleeper they may know and securely upload that data to the cloud for later analysis.

Gimme Shelter has today launched a Pledge Me campaign to raise at least $20,000 to develop the Homeless And Rough Sleepers Health (H.A.R.S.H) survey for roll-out on World Homeless Day on October 10th this year.

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