Mark Bryant has been hosting young people at risk of homelessness for over ten years now. A former bishop, he first heard about Nightstop during a church meeting for runaway teenagers. He and his wife already had experience of providing a room for refugees, so the opportunity to do the same for young people felt like a natural next step.
“I think there’s a sense of, ‘Why not?’” Mark says. “We’ve got a spare room. Somebody might need a spare room. It doesn’t make sense not to offer it.
“Within the Christian tradition, there’s great traditional hospitality that goes back to Saint Benedict and probably even before that. And Benedict says that ‘whoever comes to the monastery must be welcomed as if they were Christ’ I suppose I’d like to think that informs how I treat the people who come.”
There are some people who might be unsure about opening their homes to strangers, but in all his ten years of hosting, Mark has never once felt uneasy.
“I think it’s a combination of being warm and just being very clear what happens. My sense is that on the first night, people are sort of saying, ‘Hey, what are the rules?’ And so it’s about giving them those clear boundaries, not to be difficult, but just because it gives them some security.”
Mark has a special first-night dish that he likes to cook for his guests. A potato stew with tomatoes, olives, feta cheese, and served with flat bread.
“We’re really lucky in our kitchen because they can come and sit there and have a cup of tea with a cake or whatever while I’m cooking. And they can talk as much as they want to, so if they really don’t want to talk, that’s absolutely fine. But if they want to talk, I’m there because I’m cooking and we can chat.
“The dish works very well with non-UK nationals,” he says, “but also with people from the UK too. So at least we have something that works for the first night and then that allows us to have the conversations over that meal, you know, which gives us an idea of what we might do for the next night.”
Such are the hard times for many young people now that it’s unusual for Mark and his wife if they don’t host two or three people a week. Mark has noticed a particular rise in refugees since last Christmas, many of whom have the right to remain but can’t access housing.
“There was a chap who’d been using Nightstop for 3-4 weeks,” Mark remembers “A refugee, and he was living with some degree of depression. He couldn’t get through to his caseworker or the housing office on the phone, and you could just see him drawing into himself. And then Wednesday night he suddenly, out of the blue, got the news that he’d got temporary accommodation the council had, and he needed to come back here as he left all his stuff with us. And it was like he’d grown six inches. And you realise how much homelessness, all this stuff, how much it diminishes people.
“One of the reasons why Nightstop is terrific is because I think a lot of us see the world and are not very happy about the way it is, and we don’t know what to do to make a difference. But Nightstop is a really, really easy way to make a difference.
All you’ve got to do is make a bed and cook a meal, and you’re probably gonna cook a meal anyhow, so you just cook it for an extra person. And it’s really pretty straightforward. But we know from our bits of feedback that that really can make a world of difference.
“The backup is superb too,” says Mark. “Depaul is very, very risk aware. I would say that we have never ever felt anxious. And our overriding sense of being Nightstop hosts is that it’s a huge joy.”
