Daventry football players raise £1,500 for Northampton Hope Centre’s well-renowned Big Sleep Out event

Daventry Town Football Club's Hobbs players raised £1,500 for the Hope Centre’s biggest fundraiser event after they camped in a Northampton town centre parking lot.

Ben Collins, the Hobbs manager, who invited his teammates to join him in this event, said: "We are really thrilled to raise £1,500 for the Hope Centre's Big Sleep Out and to help them to keep offering their valuable services for homeless people in Northampton. Our goal was £500, so we are amazed and very grateful to everyone who has donated much more than we hoped for.

"We all had warm, safe homes and families to go back to on Sunday morning, and we are fortunate for that.”

The thirteenth annual event took place on Saturday evening, February 3. Attendees had the chance to witness first hand what it is like for people who frequently have no choice but to sleep outside, even during the coldest months.

With rising levels of homelessness in Northamptonshire, nearly 300 people took part in the well-renowned Big Sleep Out event, with 70 people sleeping in the car park and more than 200 participating from across the county.

More than £20,000 has been raised by all the participants, with children camping in their gardens, 111 Scouts building campsites together, and business employees camping on their premises.

Ben said: "When you walk around British towns and see people struggling and begging on the streets, having to scrounge in bins and dirty places for items to sleep under, in shop doors, anywhere they hope to stay safe, it is so wrong.

"That's why we in the Hobbs decided to suffer only for a bit—not really—by sleeping outside on a cold February night, all to raise more money for the Hope Centre. But we also made a social night out of it.”

On Saturday evening, 10 Hobbs members arrived at about 7.30pm in the car park behind Northampton College.

The Hope Centre's community and events fundraiser, Tanya Haji-Miller, challenged the groups to build shelters from materials they provided.

The Hobbs joined other groups on the open-air top floor of the parking lot who were building shelters from cardboard or plastic bits and pieces. The team gathered cardboard sheets, plastic, and a large blue tarpaulin to assemble everything in the middle of the top deck.

"Six of us slept in there, with our other four huddled under a much lower, flat roof, and probably only got three to five hours of sleep on a hard, concrete floor and ground sheets, in sleeping bags and too many heavy clothes; it wasn't very pleasant.”

"But being footballers, we enjoyed the shelter-building competition; it took five of us about two hours to assemble, and we felt really satisfied to achieve it,” said Ben.

This year's event focused on addressing the differences between the experience of those who are homeless and the one-night sleepout.

"But consider how terrible it was for homeless people nearby with nothing—only clothes, maybe a sleeping bag, no food, not washed for days, and worst of all, nowhere to go next morning—just another very hard day to slog through, trying to hide and survive.”