The following article was written by Liz Bishop, a parishioner and youth group leader at Basildon Parish.

On the evening of the 10th April, 20 young people and leaders from Our Lady and All Saints Parish in Basildon came together to sleep outside in solidarity with our homeless brothers and sisters.

We had planned a full schedule of activities before settling down for the night, including a Rock Paper Scissors Tournament, 11pm Mass (at which Fr Albert struggled not to fall asleep), a prayer meditation and social time with hot chocolate.

We also had a mini quiz based on facts and statistics around homelessness. One of te most shocking facts was that one young person became homeless or at risk of homelessness approximately every four minutes in the UK between 2024 and 25. Afterwards we took the opportunity to discuss what we hoped the evening would teach us, and what we thought the experience of sleeping out might be like.

The atmosphere was one of joy and community, with leaders and young people working together and socialising. Two girls that I spoke to were planning to film a ‘mukbang’ (a video eating and rating food) and brought various snacks with which to film – whilst neglecting to bring any cardboard or a roll mat to sleep on.

The leaders and young people made sure that there was plenty of entertaining things happening in St Therese’s Church car park throughout the night, including: sleeping bag racing on the grass, a series of intense card games, and an impromptu Youth Committee meeting.

Things began to settle down around 3:30am as the temperature dropped, and people attempted to get some sleep. I was up again at 6:00am to help with breakfast. Personally, I was glad to be back indoors: it made me think about those who don’t have the privilege of going inside after a freezing night. Even the fact that we were having breakfast was a stark reminder of the experiences of those who actually suffer homelessness, those who don’t get sponsored to ‘sleep out’ for a night in a relatively safe church car park.

The sleepy faces began to filter inside, where we shared breakfast and morning prayer, praying especially for those who are experiencing homelessness right now. At the time of writing, we have raised £1656 to be split evenly between our parish youth projects and Project 58:7, a local charity working with those who are homeless in Basildon.

On behalf of Caritas Brentwood, we would like to thank the young people of Basildon Parish for supporting those in need in their area.

If your parish are looking to host a sponsored sleepout, visit our webpage here for resources and useful information.