A 162-year-old charity supporting people affected by homelessness has announced its immediate closure due to financial challenges.
The House of St Barnabas – which had run a private members club in Soho, central London, since 2013 – said challenges it faced through the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent years had “eroded our financial reserves”.
It invested profits from the private members club into its employment academy for people experiencing homelessness, in which participants were offered long-term support to secure good work, a good home and a good network.
The charity will continue to employ seven people until the end of January to manage the wind-down of its academy programme before formally appointing Adam Stephens and Chris Allen of Evelyn Partners LLP as liquidators.
Its building and chapel at 1 Greek Street will continue to be held in trust for charitable purposes. Since 1862, the site has been run as a charity to help those who have experienced homelessness.
Fellow charity Only A Pavement Away has agreed to continue offering support to graduates from the House of St Barnabas’s programme.
‘We no longer have the resources’
The charity took hospitality in-house during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 to avoid “permanent closure”.
This enabled the charity to continue for three more years but it said its reserves continued to decline.
The charity had £531,000 of free reserves in March 2022, according to its most recently filed accounts, shy of its target of £694,000 for the year.
In 2021-22, the charity reported an income of £2.87m, of which £1.90m came from its members club, and a deficit of £95,900.
“We invested for growth this financial year and tried relentlessly to find ways to make the model work. But the returns did not come quickly enough,” the charity said in a statement.
“Then over the summer we had a forced closure due to a part collapse of the ceiling in our bar, which lost us critical income and momentum.
“While some of these losses were recouped through insurance, our business has not picked up to the level we needed to continue.
“With our costs growing substantially faster than income, our business model is simply not sustainable in the current economic environment, and we have had too many ‘rainy days’ to ride it out.
“We have explored other options for our model, but we no longer have the resources to invest in a new approach.
“We have been uncompromising in our values throughout, continuing to pay London Living Wage as basic and providing guaranteed hours and sick pay for our hospitality colleagues.”
The charity said that 307 people who have experienced homelessness graduated from its programmes over the past 10 years.
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