Our main goal

Homeless and without food, needing a helping hand, feeling rejected, alone and helpless - this is their life.

Our goal and vocation is to accept them, to be with them, to give them faith and love and to support them on their way to a dignified life.

Our team

Our team consists of a manager / social assistant / driver and a psychologist with many years of experience in working with homeless people and psychoactive substance users.

Target group

Many homeless people come from minorities and marginalized groups who live isolated in the end districts of the city, thus remaining out of the scope of the social system. Most live on the streets or in old abandoned buildings with no access to basic water, sanitation and hygiene facilities. A common feature among all of them is the inability to satisfy their basic needs, such as food, access to clean water, warmth, health, safety, and a calm and peaceful sleep. Some of our beneficiaries are elderly people, which further complicates their situation.

Target group

The people we work with live in old abandoned buildings, out-of-use cars, parks, subways, under bridges, pipes of thermal power plants and destroyed houses in the complete absence of any sanitary and domestic conditions. Most of them are elderly, which further complicates their situation, as is the fact that many also suffer from some form of addiction or mental illness.

How we help

We use an approach (outreach) thanks to which we manage to reach people in need, support them, build trusting relationships and mutual respect.

Our daily meetings with them take place according to a schedule at predetermined locations. From us they will receive social and psychological counseling, a refreshing drink, essential medicines, assistance in issuing an identity document. If they wish we make contact with their relatives and friends, support them in their contacts with various social and health institutions. When necessary, we treat wounds and abscesses, deworm, perform rapid HIV / AIDS tests, as well as the extremely important pre- and post-test counseling.

We partner with other NGOs working to support homeless, dependent and socially disadvantaged people.

We also respond to numerous signals from citizens to help homeless people from different places in Sofia.

Partners

Our main donor is the Communitas Foundation.

In the fight against health problems, our partners are often the First and Fifth Multidisciplinary Hospitals for Active Treatment and N. I. Pirogoff Multi-profile Active Treatment & Emergency University Hospital.

We successfully cooperate with the Centres for temporary accommodation of the homeless, the Regional Health Inspectorate of Sofia-city, as well as with colleagues from the Pink House, Order of Malta, Food not War and Mission without Borders.

Contacts:

Evgeniy Radushev [manager]

+359 88 674 4737

outreach@caritas-sofia.org

Achievements

Оur team uses the outreach approach in their daily work with homeless people. The advantage of this approach is the establishment of good relationships with the target groups in their communities, which implies authenticity, mutual trust and respect. 2,302 beneficiaries received services from our mobile team. Due to beneficiaries’ lifestyle and lack of stable finances, many do not have health insurance. That is why the services we offer are constantly changing and being adapted, in order to be more accurately respond to the needs of every person who seeks our assistance.

Meetings with the homeless are scheduled to take place at predetermined spots, where we distribute essential medicines, measure blood pressure and/or blood sugar levels, take blood samples for rapid HIV/AIDS and syphilis tests, as well as samples for hepatitis B and C to be further analysed in a lab. There are many cases of decontamination - tick removal and sulfur scab. Often, it is also necessary to treat infected wounds with serious complications and abscesses due to people’s lack of basic hygiene and dressing materials. Some of the wounds are old and chronic, spanning large spaces, requiring frequent treatment. In others, medical specialist intervention is also required.

The distribution of painkillers, as well as the distribution of hot drinks and broths is part of our daily work in our field meetings with the various beneficiary groups.

1. Difficulties

Every day, our team is confronted with various complicated cases and most of the time we try to act fast and find a solution as quickly as possible.

• Increasingly on the street, we find people with mental illness (most often schizophrenia) who have been abandoned by their loved ones. Almost every one of them is without an ID. The refusal of institutions to deal with such cases is ubiquitous. Even Sofia City Police is powerless in most cases in resolving such cases.
• Many our beneficiaries were not born in Sofia and do not have temporary or permanent address registration in the capital. This makes it impossible to issue an ID card from any police station in the city of Sofia.
• The lack of a working crisis centre in the period from April 1 to December 1 each year is another problem that the Sofia City Municipality continuously fails to address.
• The lack of public laundry facilities and solidarity showers for maintaining personal hygiene is another example.
• There is a sense of abdication amongst the state social services, the police and the administration, as well as a great reluctance on their part to work for improvement of the situation with homeless people in the capital.

Partners

Our project was funded by the “Communitas” Foundation, the Ministry of Health (MH) and Caritas Ostrava. Following the completion of the project for the prevention of tuberculosis in Bulgaria, funded by the MH, the main sponsors of the project remained “Communitas” and Caritas Ostrava thanks to whom we are able to carry out the majority of the activities described above.

Our team is in constant contact with representatives of the Social Assistance Directorate in the regions of Vazrazhdane, Krasna Polyana, Mladost, Poduene and Serdika. We also have good relationships with the Centres for Temporary Accommodation of Homeless on the territory of Sofia and the municipal crisis centres.

With the help of donations from the National Drug Addiction Centre and the National HIV and AIDS Confirmation Laboratory, our beneficiaries managed to receive additional medical tests. These are the rapid HIV/AIDS and syphilis tests, and hepatitis B and C tests. Many such tests were also conducted by our team on the invitation of the “Health Initiative” Foundation and the “Food, Not War” Foundation. In addition, we organized two initiatives related to raising the awareness of young people about HIV/AIDS and risks of sexually transmitted disease. The sessions were held with adolescents accommodated in a dormitory, run by “Concordia”.

Our main partners in the fight for alleviating the consequences of diseases and health issues among homeless people remain the Second and the Fifth Multi-profile Hospitals in Sofia. We also receive assistance from the Regional Anti-tuberculosis Dispensary and the Pulmonary Hospital “St. Sofia” in relation to the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis.

We also received regular donations of food, clothing and hygiene materials from Raiffeisen Bank Bulgaria, Experian Bulgaria, IPSOS Bulgaria, AIG Bulgaria, DXC Technology Bulgaria, Hewlett Packard Bulgaria, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Personal stories