Off-Road Kids & Münchner Kältebus
In our last blogpost about homelessness, we want to introduce you to two organizations that are actively fighting homelessness. As soon as our second collection goes online, we will donate the collected amount from the first collection. We have chosen the Off Road Kids Stiftung and the Münchner Kältebus.
Off Road Kids
The Off Road Kids Stiftung is based in Munich and aims to help street children and young adults with little or no family support to integrate back into society. In doing so, they place particular emphasis on the long term, being able to offer the best future prospects to the young people in their care.
How does Off Road Kids help the young homeless?
The Off Road Kids Stiftung offers streetwork stations in the metropolitan areas of Berlin, Dortmund, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Cologne and operates in two areas of activity. On the one hand they take care of street kids, young homeless people and couch hoppers and on the other hand they take care of foster children and young people without family support. Since our blog series is about homelessness, we will focus on the first area of activity, for which the streetwork stations play a particularly important role.
In addition to the workshop stations, the Off Road Kids Stiftung offers additional services to support young people. One of them is Streetwork+, which focuses on the health of the young homeless. For example, they offer programs on pregnancy prevention, dental hygiene, and infection prevention.
With the PREJOB program, Off Road Kids offers the young homeless the opportunity to complete their secondary school diploma through intensive socio-educational support. The training is adapted to each individual, both in terms of time and content. The aim is to enable the young people to enter professional life and to offer them a long-term perspective.
Another program is Stabilize, which serves to continue to support the young people even after they have been successfully placed in housing and to provide them with long-term assistance.
In addition to the physical support services, the Off Road Kids Stiftung also offers online counseling with the help of the virtual streetwork station sofahopper.de. This aims to reach young people nationwide and offer them counseling opportunities to prevent them from becoming homeless at an early stage.
Achievements of the Off Road Kids Stiftung
The Off Road Kids Stiftung has already placed 5,000 young people in permanent housing since 1993 and offers a total of 10,000 counseling appointments per year, which amounts to nearly 30 appointments per day. For a successful placement they need about 75 working hours and invest about 3000€ in each rescued young person.
Münchner Kältebus
The second organization we would like to introduce to you is the Munich Cold Bus. Especially in winter, the homeless face particularly hard conditions, in addition to the Corona pandemic including lockdown, which leads to the fact that homeless people can no longer use the offered aid facilities as usual.
This is where the Kältebus comes into play, which drives to the known locations of the homeless in the evenings from 7 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., to provide them with hot and cold food, drinks, and hygiene articles.
In difference to the Off Road Kids Stiftung, the Münchner Kältebus focuses on the short-term needs of the homeless and enables them to get help without having to visit a specific aid facility. They do not ask the homeless any uncomfortable questions unless the homeless open up on their own and if someone asks for help or counseling, the Munich Cold Bus offers that as well.
As you know from our previous blogs, we will be donating 5% of our profits from each collection to an organization, however, we would love if you would also consider donating a small amount to an organization of your choice and help us spread more laughter and positivity in our world!
