Support our members who are at the worst end of the housing crisis and doing everything we can to fight it!
HASL keeps on growing and we are busier than ever organising housing support and action across south London daily! One family recently won a massive High Court victory over Southwark council’s cruel treatment of families in overcrowded housing, our group protest at Lambeth’s Civic Centre stood up for homeless families facing serious health issues, and our Saturday meetings have over 100 people attending.
All these activities and bigger, busier meetings mean that the costs of running our group have also increased. We’ve moved to a new bigger venue and our refreshments costs have also risen. Housing organising is hungry work and we want to make sure all our members are properly hydrated and have a healthy snack. Our new costs include making sure we have medical masks for everyone at our group meetings so that we can run them as safely as possible.
We don’t have a membership fee for HASL because many of our members are already in financial hardship and our members give so much of their time and energies running the group. So instead we ask for supporters to set up solidarity standing orders to give the equivalent of membership fees.
These standing orders from our amazing supporters help to cover our basic running costs. But we need more of you! From our experience, having supporters with regular standing orders is the best way to fund our group – it’s a way to build solidarity and the HASL family, it helps to keep our group truly independent, it means we can focus on energies on housing organising (rather than doing grant applications) and it’s a sustainable funding model so we’re confident we can meet our basic costs.
If you or someone you know have secure housing with a stable income, please consider setting up a £4 a month standing order to support our group. Send us an email at haslfinance[at]gmail.com and we’ll send you instructions on setting up a standing order. When we’re doing our accounts, the best thing is seeing all our supporters’ names on the bank statements!
Please help us spread the word to help us reach our target of 50 new standing order supporters.
More about our funding
HASL’s basics costs include hall hire, meeting refreshments, crafts for children’s activities, medical masks, printing, and protest props!
Our running costs are funded by our supporters’ standing orders. We also have a Trust for London grant which pays for our 2 housing group co-ordinators who are paid for 2 days and 1 day a week.
Housing Action Southwark & Lambeth 