As always, Notre Dame’s staff and students have spent the weeks leading up to Christmas thinking of others and finding ways to brighten their lives.
Our traditional advent charity collection benefited the organisations below:
- Homeless Street Angels. “An award-winning charity providing outreach every week on the streets of Leeds and working to get the homeless off the street.”
- St Anne’s Resource Centre. “A homelessness resource centre with an open-door policy, working with people who are homeless, rough sleeping or vulnerably housed.”
- Beacon Leeds. "Beacon provides three types of accommodation for our clients, and all provide support. We have self-contained flats with essentials and white goods provided, shared accommodation and Intensive Support Environments (ISEs). The ISEs provide on-site, round-the-clock support in a hostel environment."
Staff from Homeless Street Angels attended an assembly at the start of December, talking passionately about a family member’s untimely death due to homelessness and drug use. This experience inspired the charity’s founders to help those who are most vulnerable, and now they hand out 100 meals to the homeless every Thursday night in Leeds, in addition to clean clothes, toiletries and more. They also work with Leeds City Council and Housing Options to re-house the homeless, and have signed the Leeds Homeless Charter to help eradicate homelessness in Leeds.
In addition to collecting for these charities, our students have created and written Christmas cards for residents of Oaktree Lodge care home in Gipton, and retired teachers and elderly religious sisters of the Notre Dame Order, whose forebears set up the College as an educational establishment.
Our lower sixth students have also been researching prisoners of conscience, and either writing cards or sending messages of hope to those unfairly imprisoned for their beliefs.
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