As the long summer ends and freshers move in, we enter the caffeine-fuelled eight weeks of Michaelmas. As the weeks progress, you find yourself walking back from afternoon lectures in near pitch-black conditions, sniffling from a mixture of leftover freshers flu, tear-inducing supervision work and the rapidly dropping temperatures.

But for the homeless population in Cambridge, this signals a particularly bleak and dangerous time of year for rough sleepers who find themselves in a remarkably vulnerable situation.

In spite of this, October also means the return of volunteers at Streetbite, a student-run charity at Cambridge which provides those without a permanent home on the streets with food, hot drinks and other amenities like menstrual products and dog biscuits, as well as just company.

Using my experiences as a previous volunteer and hearing from the 2022-23 Streetbite president, student Max Earle, I would like to spotlight the local yet significant impact that the organisation has.

“We cannot wait around for long-term change from the comforts of our college accommodation while denying everyday kindness to the people we’re trying to help”

One argument often heard against emergency relief charities, from small-scale homeless outreach programmes to the international Doctors Without Borders, is that homelessness is a systemic problem, and your loose change is merely slapping a plaster over a broken leg. This cynical view may have truth to it, yet removes any incentive to help on a local level. You as an individual or even an organisation may be incapable of stopping homelessness everywhere and forever – but that’s not the point. While wider political and systemic change is needed, this has never been mutually exclusive with local efforts to alleviate the symptoms. We cannot wait around for long-term change from the comforts of our college accommodation while denying everyday kindness to the people we’re trying to help.

A typical session from 6-8pm as a student volunteer involves you and a partner visiting Downing Place United Reformed Church (colloquially known to many as ’that church by Spoons’), who allow Streetbite to store trolleys, food and other supplies. You’d then don your bright orange vests, pack supplies into a trolley, including sandwiches made by another volunteer a few hours beforehand, and head off into town. The two routes follow a circle around the town centre and then around Grafton, and you’d supply any rough sleepers with food, hot drinks and company along the way.

It’s difficult to quantify the impact, but last year’s president Max Earle praises the positive social effects in “simply showing that somebody still cares” at a time where losing a constant home can come with less warning than ever – “during a cost of living crisis when moving goalposts unfortunately lead many to fall out from the bottom of the system”. From this, Max hopes that small acts of kindness, where many in that situation are accustomed to “being ignored or even abused by the rest of society”, can encourage people to seek further help as well as ease the physical and emotional effects of the transition to homelessness.

This philosophy stands clear in the advice given to volunteers to spark a conversation with recipients. More than anything, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed hearing their stories, and they are always immensely kind and grateful for a meal after an arduous day.

“The most destructive mentality to addressing social problems is the one that says that if we can’t singlehandedly fix something, we shouldn’t bother trying”

Streetbite is also committed to helping those who don’t embody the typical face of homelessness – newspaper vendors reportedly working 14-hour shifts or simply anyone who recognises the orange vests and asks for food.

So, what does it take for this student-run charity to function?

Apart from volunteers, who ease the administrative burden by their “generosity” and “enthusiasm” according to Max, Streetbite requires fundraising to ensure that food can be bought and distributed. This comes in the form of events such as open-mic night from the last academic year, as well as sponsors.

Occasionally collaborating with other local homeless charities, for example, Wintercomfort and Jimmy’s, Max maintains that Streetbite also aims to dispel the ‘town vs gown’ mentality that “can be easy to fall into studying at the university” by working with non-student charities that support those on the streets.

In the face of nihilistic narratives surrounding the continuing decline of the economy, environment and politics, we should all be more galvanised to help those in the small ways that we can, and I would highly encourage joining Streetbite to anyone able to do so. Perhaps the most destructive mentality to addressing social problems is the one that says that if we can’t singlehandedly fix something, we shouldn’t bother trying.