About Us

Everybody needs Shelter

The Shelter Trust was established over 30 years ago and is now the leading provider of accommodation and support services for the homeless community in Jersey.

The Trust provides accommodation, food, support / encouragement for around 125 people per night at eight sites in and around the wider town area.

Last year, the Trust supported over 500 individuals.

The age range of Shelter Trust users is from 16-74.  In recent years, the Trust has seen a big increase in the number of young people (under 25) becoming homeless.

Currently, around 30 per cent of our service users are aged between 16 and 25 years and, whereas historically around one in ten of the local homeless community were female, the number of young female service users in the Trust is more like two or three in ten. 

Breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper are provided for service users at four of the main sites (the fifth site is self-catering).  On average, the Trust prepares around 100,000 meals per year.

The reasons why an individual becomes homeless are many, nonetheless, several reasons as cited often enough by homeless people to bear repetition here; unemployment, substance misuse, mental health difficulties, physical health difficulties, returning to the community from prison, relationship breakdown and sometimes there is a lack of appropriate, affordable accommodation.

Nobody sets out to be or to remain homeless.  The main aim of the Trust is to accommodate homeless people for as short a time as is practically possible before their return to mainstream accommodation and living.

30 years ago, groups of homeless people were regularly found sleeping in multi-storey car parks and other sites.  However, as a result of the work the Jersey Homeless Outreach Group ('JHOG'), which works in partnership with the Trust, rough sleeping is now relatively rare.