DanChurchSocial

DanChurchSocial in Aarhus – a home for the city’s homeless and vulnerable

As soon as you enter the door of DanChurchSocial in Aarhus, you sense that it is a building full of life and with many different types of people under one roof. DanChurchSocial in Aarhus undertakes many activities to help the homeless and other vulnerable people in the city. Here at JPS, we have chosen to support this work.

Our sponsorship is specifically aimed at DanChurchSocial’s work with the city’s vulnerable Greenlanders. This group is a very visible part of the cityscape and it is estimated that they comprise 20-30% of the total number of vulnerable people in the city. In cooperation with Aarhus municipality, DanChurchSocial has therefore established a drop-in centre for Greenlanders in Sydhavnen, a district of Aarhus. Here the focus is on making the place a comfortable and safe place to be.

In addition to the Greenlandic centre, DanChurchSocial runs a large house on Nørre Allé, a street in the centre of Aarhus. The house has 70 employees, 100 volunteers and is used by an average of 200 users in the warm room every day.

DanChurchSocial

DanChurchSocial is divided into several sections. The warm room is open 24/7 and is where the users come in from the street to eat, chat and have a place to sleep. For 20-25 kroner they can buy a good meal, and if they have no money they are given food vouchers. Next to the warm room is the fix room.. 40 drug users come here every day to take their fix in orderly and supervised conditions.

The final part of the house consists of various activity rooms. Right now there are two particularly important work groups in the house – Workshop and Needle and Thread. The Workshop is a woodworking workshop where primarily men work to transform old furniture and wood into something new, useful and saleable.

DanChurchSocial
DanChurchSocial

Needle and Thread is a counterpart to the Workshop, mostly with women – volunteers and users. In Needle and Thread, surplus materials from recycling stores are transformed into new, useful and saleable products. Sleeping bags are sewn into padded jackets, children’s dresses are sewn from old fabrics combined with a home-made piece knitted in a knitting club from surplus yarn. Everything ends up as UNIKA products that can be sold together with a story about the work of DanChurchSocial. Needle and Thread has now been running for 4 years and has an impressively high success rate for the young people associated with the youth project – about half of the users leave ready to move on in life with a family, job and education.

Learn more about our other CSR initiatives