IT WAS November, the weather was getting colder and Christmas shoppers were beginning to appear on the streets.
John Rodgers stood at the top of Waverley Steps looking at the cheerful crowds and the brightly lit shop windows.
"It was as if I was outside looking in, like someone in a movie looking in through a window at everyone having fun," he says. "There were couples and families, buying presents for loved ones, going for a meal, then going back to their warm homes." Rodgers did not have a home. Sleeping rough, his choices extended to a bench in Princes Street Gardens, or a berth on the floor of the nearby public toilets.
Today, Rodgers says, people in that position have another option. Bethany Christian Trust's Care Shelter opened its doors this week and will stay open until April, offering a hot meal and a warm place to sleep each night through the winter for those who have nowhere else to go. Rodgers, 45, is now Bethany's director of residential support services, and he knows in his bones how important this service is.
But the charity struggled to fund the shelter every year in addition to their other services, until they struck on an innovative idea: selling Christmas trees. Last year, sales through their website
www.caringchristmastrees.com, made £40,000 for Bethany in Edinburgh alone. This year, they hope to double the number of trees sold.
Caring Christmas Trees is more than a bright idea, it's a social enterprise. Now the largest online retailer of Christmas trees in the country, it offers franchises to other charities to raise money in their local area through tree sales.
"The public have been great at getting the message," says Rodgers. "Just one tree can help provide food and a bed for the night for someone, it makes a difference. They're getting the blessing of a lovely tree, and they know the money is going towards providing for someone's practical needs."
Rodgers understands these needs well. In 1987, when he stood at the top of Waverley Steps and watched the crowds, he was living a double life. By day, he was holding down a job in an Edinburgh bank, but he was also a chronic alcoholic. His only "home" was a squat in Dunfermline.
He recalls: "I would get the first bus to work, shower, shave and put a shirt and tie on before anyone else got in. Nobody was any the wiser that I was homeless. Every week I'd give my brother a bag of dirty clothes and he'd give me back a bag of clean laundry. He thought I was living in a bedsit and didn't have a washing machine."
Rodgers says he had been drinking heavily since he was 16. "Things weren't easy growing up, but nobody's to blame for my addiction but me, I'm the one who put the drink to my mouth. My family couldn't cope with my drunken behaviour. They never rejected me, but they had to cut me loose to find my own way in life."
By his early twenties, he felt his life was spiralling out of control. "In 1987, as the winter grew near, my spirits started to lower and my drinking got heavier. Some nights I was not getting home to Dunfermline and found myself sleeping rough in Edinburgh." He remembers being woken by the police when sleeping on the concrete balcony of a block of flats. "They said if they caught me again they'd arrest me for vagrancy."
One day his boss at the bank called him into her office. She had noticed his erratic behaviour and urged him to seek help. The council refered him to Bethany Christian Trust, who offered him support and a place to stay.
Bethany was founded in 1983 by a Leith minister, Rev Alan Berry, to help homeless people in Edinburgh. It now has more than 180 staff and a turnover of more than £5 million. Its work extends from frontline services such as soup kitchens and drop-in centres, to supported accommodation and training for independent living.
"I used and abused Bethany as much as I did any other landlord at the time," Rodgers admits. "I screwed them for money, but the difference was they didn't evict me. Every other experience I'd had, people had come to the end of their tether with me and my lack of responsibility for my life.
"At first that made me push the boundaries even more, then it started to challenge me. These were decent people, why were they not punishing me? Alan Berry sat me down and said, 'John, we love you, we want to help you, we know you have issues around alcohol, but we believe your life could be so much better if you address this.' I was shocked that someone had taken the time to sit me down and talk to me about this. I started to wonder if I could get out of this pit of homelessness, this world of despair I was existing in. Was there hope?"
The sense of acceptance he discovered in his 16 months as a resident at Bethany gave him the confidence to tackle his addiction. He also came to a Christian faith. "I used to think Christians were drips. But I got to know a few guys who had similar background to myself, but moved on from the drink. They had a faith but it didn't make them wishy-washy, they were still the same solid characters they'd always been. I became a Christian then myself and I haven't looked back since. I've been sober since 1991."
He had moved on to work for an estate agent, then as a cashier in a hotel, but was looking for more from life. "I think my faith had challenged me to do more than count money," he says, smiling. He switched to the care sector, working with the elderly, then in 1994, when a job came up as a project worker with Bethany's new 28-bed emergency hostel, he applied and was successful. In 1997 he became the manager, taking up his present post overseeing all Bethany's residential services in 2004. "You could have knocked me down with a feather when I got it!" he says.
"I'm the still the same John I was when I first came to Bethany, and I know my story is an inspiration for other service-users. I've had the opportunity to share with and encourage a lot of men and women out of homelessness and addictive lifestyles. Say somebody comes in, they're stinking of alcohol and urine, they've got a black eye and blood running down their face. I get alongside them and they say, 'What the f*** do you know?' I can say, 'I've been there, done that, got the T-shirt mate.' Their faces light up.
"My motivation comes from a verse in the Bible which says, 'Those who have been forgiven much, love much.' Having been on the receiving end of grace, goodness, kindness and love I want to show that as much I can. We do everything we can to manage positive change in the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in society."
The reward is to see other lives transformed: Bethany helps 4,000 people out of homelessness every year. Rodgers says: "We had one guy a couple of years ago came to the Care Shelter, he had a drink problem and his wife had thrown him out. We got him into Bethany House and got him help with his addiction. Now he's reconciled with his family and is the deputy manager of a garage. Within 12 months his life was turned around. Of course, some guys choose not to do that, and we're just got to do what we can.
"I've seen people move from dependency to independence to interdependence as part of their own communities. It's realistic, not idealistic; people, if they want to, can make it."
HOW IT WORKS
THIS year, Bethany Christian Trust aims to sell 9,000 Caring Christmas Trees the length and breadth of Scotland.
Profits go directly to Bethany projects in Edinburgh, Fife and Aberdeen, and to other charities Glasgow, Dundee, Perth and Paisley.
Customers simply go to the website at
www.caringchristmastrees.com, order their chosen size of tree (from 4ft to 8ft), select the day and depot where they will collect it and pay using a credit card.
At the depot, Bethany volunteers will help them choose a tree of the right height from the available selection. "Everyone's taste in Christmas trees is different, and every tree is unique," says Emma Galloway, manager of Caring Christmas Trees UK. "The challenge to our volunteers is to find the perfect Christmas tree for you."
It is estimated that 28 per cent of households buy a real Christmas tree. Far from being bad for the environment, a real tree grown in sustainably managed Scottish forests is carbon neutral as long as it is recycled after use, unlike a plastic tree which is typically discarded after a few years to languish in a landfill site.
Galloway says: "It was a volunteer who said to us a few years ago, 'Why don't you sell Christmas trees?' The idea grew arms and legs – and branches. We realised we'd broken into the world of charity Christmas trees in a big way. It just catches people's imagination, it's such a simple idea.
"If you're going to buy a Christmas tree anyway, why not do some good at the same time?"
