FLACK
About us
FLACK works with the potential of homeless people by involving them in the production of a monthly what’s on magazine. Flack offers training, support and a voice to people who are often overlooked; and so helps to rebuild their self-esteem and break the cycle of homelessness. FLACK is a start-up charitable social enterprise based in Cambridge.
This is how one of our volunteers has described FLACK ...
“People are free to engage at whatever level they’d like, from using the opportunity to meet friends in a setting that is away from the negative focus that pervades the hostels, using the chance to improve their computer and literacy skills, contributing some artwork or poetry, contributing their opinions, to starting to take the initiative and come up with new projects, articles, and ideas. There is openness to the atmosphere at Flack that lets people breathe and become themselves a bit more. Even though there is no pressure on people to ‘change’, everyone who has been involved so far, from staff to volunteers to service users, has become more confident, more themselves, happier with who they are or at least more aware of who they are and what they want from life.
Several people have stopped taking class A drugs, several have gotten jobs, people have learned loads of new skills, people have become a lot more assertive and are embracing their lives a lot more, and everyone has moved towards accepting themselves as they are rather than beating themselves up with what they aren’t or what they haven’t done. FLACK actually gives you the ownership of something…and if you have an idea, the response from others is not ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but ‘tell me more, how can we make that a reality?’ and I think that’s really refreshing. There’s really nothing like it at all.”
What we do
We provide training, creative mentoring and the opportunity to contribute to a monthly listings magazine to homeless, ex-homeless and vulnerably housed people. Our ethos is centred on fostering our beneficiaries’ potential rather than focusing on their problems. We have recently completed a highly successful pilot project, producing 10 monthly editions of our magazine specifically for the homeless community.
Our beneficiaries and volunteers have achieved much already:
- over three and a half thousand hours’ work has been invested in the magazine
- thirty-eight homeless people have published at least one piece of reportage, fiction or poetry in our magazine
- two contributors have entered regular employment
- two have managed to beat heroin addiction
- one is studying for a degree.
What we’re raising funds for
FLACK has no desire to treat its donors as life-support machines, or to be continually expending our energy on fundraising. We want to become self-sufficient as soon as possible, funded by the sale of our magazine both on the street, in retail outlets and to postal subscribers. It’s an entirely achievable goal – market research has been hugely positive, our pilot project extremely well-received and our detailed three-year business plan predicts sustainability by the beginning of Year 4 (available by request from our website). Our production team are raring to work but like all small businesses we need seed funding to give us chance.
Current target
In total FLACK needs to generate £200,000 seed funding over the next three years.
We hope that through Allia bonds we can generate £30K by March 2012, a further £20K by March 2013, and an additional 10K by March 2014.
FLACK Cambridge is a Registered Charity No: 1136657.
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