"I owe Crisis my life"

- Samuel Timberlake

Every year Crisis set up homeless shelters throughout london. Over the course of the festive period, anyone who is identified as vulnerable and who is sleeping on the streets is invited to stay at the Rough Sleeper Center, at a secret location in the capital.

Today, 100 people along with myself volunteered to help run the facility which tonight has 333 guests staying.

Everyone has a story.

Some were successful family men who over night lost everything, and turned to crisis for the 1st time.

Others have been here for 15 years on the trot.

This isn't the forum to tell those stories. Not tonight anyway. What I do want to share with you is a personal feeling of warm fuzziness born of doing something good, equaled by a sence of gut renching sympathy for everyone here, knowing that come Friday morning, the center closes again for another year.

So I want to urge anyone reading this to spend a couple of minutes having a look at the "Crisis at Christmas" webpage. To see what amazing work this charity do all year round. Their focus is on training people and giving them the tools to break out of the cycle that is homelessness.

Finally to this photo... One of the volunteers today was working here while on holiday from the continent. In her spare time she knitted 100 of these hearts for all of tonights volunteers, to represent how she felt following her stint at the shelter this year.