Supporting outreach with bikes by Beryl

Watford’s pay-and-ride bike scheme, known as Beryl Bikes, has been in place since 2020 and it’s common to see people riding the distinctive green bikes across the town.

Earlier this year, Beryl’s Community Champions initiative were kind enough to award our homelessness outreach team with 3000 minutes of complementary rides as the bikes had become an integral part of how the two outreach workers could quickly respond to reports of street homelessness and visit people already known to be rough sleeping anywhere in the town. As a testament to the responsiveness of the Outreach Team, all 3000 minutes had been used by mid-August and so, a little cheekily, we reached out to Beryl for continued support.

The Community Champions team were really understanding of the need that we were addressing and generously offered us another 3000 minutes that we are currently utilising as we head into the winter and the busiest time of year for homelessness charities.

The relationship with Beryl has been incredibly helpful to the Outreach team as Watford is a large area to cover on foot and many of the locations the team travel to are not easily accessible by car or public transport. The team go out for four hours at a time but the local parks are huge so the bikes make it possible to cover an area that we wouldn’t be able to in a single session otherwise. When we get a call for support the bikes make it easy to hop on and get to the location of people rough sleeping before they have moved elsewhere.

“We use the bikes every day to allow us to reach further, quicker. We have an individual who was sleeping by a Watford visitor attraction – walking this would take us an hour but with the bikes takes us only 30 minutes. This means we can support this individual twice as much. The bikes make such a massive difference to our shift.” – Joe and David, Outreach Plus Team

We are really grateful for the donation of free rides and, as we continue to serve people experiencing homelessness in Watford, we hope to continue using the bikes to support our work.