City Missioner Corinne Haines talks about the scale of need across our community, and the growing complexity of the circumstances faced by the people who come to the Christchurch City Mission seeking support.

We’ve set ourselves the goal of providing 1600 of our big bumper Christmas food parcels to deserving clients in the three days before December 25.

The record will come when we deliver 600 parcels on the Monday and Tuesday. Normally we are maxed out providing 88 parcels a day, so 600 is amazing and something we have not achieved before.

Two women talked bravely and honestly about what it is like to not have enough when everyone else is celebrating with excess. The pair came to the Mission together last Christmas in Wendy’s car. Milly had lost her car in the middle of what she called “a hard ass week from hell”.

Milly was facing Christmas alone with three children, including a new-born, she was crazy with stress and a lot of that was caused by worry about her kids when she had nothing to give. “My kids were hearing about Santa from the other kids at school, saying how they were going to get all these great presents and have a big feast.

Frank is a wonderful example of how with the right support at the right time a life can be dramatically changed for better, even when there have been decades of spiralling down and, in his case, almost dying.

A snapshot of three Christmases shows how things changed because he was determined to save himself and because of the help we were able to give him.

We are thrilled that The Press has launched a Reverse Advent Calendar foodbank drive this month to help us boost our stocks to meet demand in the New Year.

It is the third year The Press has run the drive and the response and donation of food from readers has got bigger and bigger for each one.

It’s Christmas Eve and our Christmas food parcels are being carried across the City Mission forecourt by volunteer military policemen to go in car boots. In the cars, parents are smiling with relief, and children are squealing, happy that a City Mission staff member has tossed some lollies through the window. This is what giving joy at Christmas looks like.

Christchurch’s two Anglican cathedrals will have a big part to play in our City Mission Christmas activities this year. Christmas trees will be twinkling away in both the Transitional Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral where presents can be left so that we can give them to children of families who can’t afford gifts.

As Christmas draws near, we all love to show generosity, compassion, and the joy of giving. But for many of the families that we support at the Mission, this season brings stress and uncertainty — the challenge of feeding the family at Christmas, or the challenge of buying even a single gift to place under the tree for their children.

We run the only drop-in social worker service in Christchurch. That’s a big deal because when people are at their most desperate, most withdrawn, and most physically and mentally ill they often struggle badly to make and keep future appointments.

But 70 percent of the 1200 clients our social workers see each year are new to us, and so it’s difficult to know what the social worker will find when they close the interview room door and meet the client across the table.

As with most of our other social services, our social workers take on some of the hardest cases in the city that many other places find too difficult.

Retired Rangiora farmer Ross McQueen has backed the City Mission for five decades.

Ross is one of our highly valued regular donors and has also put in decades of volunteer work, firstly as a driving force behind a youth centre project we ran in North Canterbury, and then also as one of our governance team.

Nearing 80 years, he’s still a member of the Trust Board which oversees the City Mission. In this year’s New Year Honours, Ross was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his community work including his service to us.

Helping people who are sleeping out on the streets is one of our core jobs but by far most of the work we do through services such as social work, addiction counselling, day programmes, community hubs, and foodbank is with people who are housed.

Here is a glimpse at the daily life of thousands of Cantabrians who will be steeling themselves to get through another winter. Imagine this was your winter!

This winter we are more worried than we have been for a long time about how people on the streets are going to cope. The number trying to get through the cold months without a house will be higher than ever and they will include many people who are not hardened to sleeping out. This is because of a variety of reasons, including a lack of accommodation, the Government’s tighter approach to emergency housing, rising under-employment and unemployment, and rising costs, especially power.

Brian* woke up in hospital and he was alive. Very ill, but still alive. He’d tried to end his life a day or so ago when he couldn’t think of any reason to wake up in the morning.
He’d survived and now, lying in a hospital bed, he still didn’t know why he should be alive. Running through his mind were two choices: Option A was to have another go at not waking up, option B was “get out of this, try and change things around and be happy”.

Brian is one of our clients and you can read his full story in A Second Chance At Life. Here he shares in his own words what it is like to be consumed by alcohol and then be able to turn away.