East Belfast MissionID: 3188

Community Charity

1. Hosford House – a hostel for homelessness people

2. Stepping Stone - an employability service providing advice and guidance on employment opportunities and education.

3. re:fresh - a 4-star café providing low cost healthy meals to the local community. Supplemented meals are available for pensioners and a Meals on Wheels service currently serves over 80 housebound people within a three mile radius. In addition, the café provides a welcoming environment as volunteer befrienders seeks to develop community life.

4. re:store - This is EBM’s social economy project. The project aims to take goods out of the waste stream and recycle them, selling them through one of the nine retail outlets across Northern Ireland. This helps to provide good quality low cost furniture to local communities and fund the services offered by EBM.

5. Pastoral - The EBM pastoral team offer a range of social, theological and religious services. These range from Church worship services, weekly cell groups, and visitation to youth and community groups like ‘mothers and toddlers’ and ‘Friendship Circle’. In addition the pastoral team offer pastoral counselling and a professional counselling service.

6. Inner East Forum - The Mission helped establish and currently hosts a forum of protestant, unionist and loyalist groups in the inner East Belfast area. It was established in response to the inter-community street violence in the summer of 2001. The forum has been able to re-establish communication with the nationalist/republican community in the local area and continues to develop these relationships.

7. Skainos - This urban regeneration project is the future of EBM and seeks to regenerate the local area. This £22 million pound project will see the development of a number of sites and will provide all that EBM currently provides and in addition will offer shop frontage, accommodation, a new hostel for those experiencing homelessness, a new family and community centre, Age Concern facility for the frail elderly, Belfast Metropolitan College Further Education facilities, and a new street and communal square for local events.