This Christmas day will see the fifth Bubic Christmas dinner for our service users. Previous years’ events have been a huge success and provided a welcome and warm environment with a great community atmosphere.
Bubic (Bringing Unity Back Into the Community) is an award winning community-based organisation that provides support for drug users, ex-drug users, their families and friends. Our strength lies in our approach. We work in and around communities encouraging peer mentors to give those who are using drugs practical advice and emotional support to help change their lifestyle and learn life skills.
The Christmas Day event for our service users and volunteers is to help support them through an emotionally difficult time of year, with a full Christmas dinner served to 50 or more individuals. ‘It’s a worthwhile, charitable and peaceful event says Derwyn, a Bubic volunteer mentor and ex-service-user. ‘I enjoyed being a part of last year’s festivities and am eagerly anticipating this year’s event.’
In true Bubic style, the event is a community initiative and is only possible through the donation of people’s time and effort. A big thank you to organisations from within the community, including local Sainsbury’s stores in Tottenham, who support Bubic through providing donations. Haringey Mencap not only donate the use of their beautiful Grade II listed building but also assist, alongside Bubic’s staff and volunteers, in setting up for the event on Christmas Eve and provide transportation for our service users on Christmas Day.
John, a Haringey Recovery Service user, volunteered on Christmas Day last year. ‘I was struck by the diversity of the group, from single men like me to single women and couples, from the elderly to families, people with young children and babies, to people whom society has chosen to forget,’ he told The Worm magazine (featured in DDN, November, page 10).
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ubic prides itself on providing a platform from which members of our community can raise themselves up and aspire to greater things. Those who have previously encountered negative responses due to past behaviour and criminal records are given opportunity, and through proving their skills and abilities with Bubic, move onwards and upwards. Mark Nash, now a successful programme manager both in prison and the community, says, ‘Coming through Bubic gave me a platform. If there was no Bubic there would be no-one to assist those coming out of prison.’
With Bubic gaining centre recognition from Gateway Qualifications, followed by direct claims status in 2015, we are now able to further build on this platform by providing relevant, recognised, bite-size qualifications that are achievable within a matter of weeks. These qualifications centre on increasing your confidence and self-awareness, learning new skills and enhancing existing knowledge with the goal of helping others within your community. They embody what Bubic is about and provide a recognised next step in the recovery process for our service users, as well as an opportunity for others to educate themselves and give back to their community.
We’re also planning to further expand our outreach programme, which is essential to our organisation as it enables us to connect with the hard-to-reach clients; we bring the service to them. Our client Dodger recalls, ‘Bubic have engaged me in the snow, when it was cold. They’ve come into crack houses and given me food and supported me in the early hours of the morning.’
We go where others fear to tread!
Contact Bubic at www.bubic.org.uk or 020 8808 6550 for further details about services – or if you are a service user in Haringey and would like to join them for Christmas dinner