Snowflake Meltdown
From 2006 The Snowflake Trust has operated as a charity providing shelter and physical support to those in need in Hastings and St Leonards. Between 2011 and 2020 the Trust’s Winter Night Shelter offered immediate temporary shelter at a series of rolling locations to people who would have otherwise been sleeping rough on the streets.
In 2020, taking account of the Covid pandemic lockdowns and social distancing edicts, central government became seriously concerned at the risk of people contracting and transmitting the disease while rough sleeping, and sufficient public funds were provided to ensure that almost all homeless people could find temporary accommodation. Snowflake’s shelter offer became thus, for a short period, effectively redundant. Instead, the charity adapted its support for its still precarious clientele by providing hot evening meals seven days a week.
It has done that over the last three winters. Earlier this year, it also opened a community café – Igloo in Robertson Street – with the intention of staffing it with volunteers and applying all profits to the meal provision service. But Igloo wasn’t the success that the charity trustees hoped for. It closed after only a few weeks, with chair Andre Crighton explaining to volunteers that lack of donations or other funding made the venture unsustainable.
Sadly, Mr Crighton has also announced that, due to the ill-health of a number of the trustees and the need for the others “to stop, rest, regroup and recruit”, the winter provision of hot meals will also be suspended for this winter.
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