A WINCHESTER charity is urgently calling for volunteers to help the city’s homeless.

Winchester Churches Nightshelter needs more helping hands in order to keep its doors open on Sundays.

The charity opens every night of the year, offering food and accommodation, to local homeless people but said that feedback from residents indicated Sundays were in more demand than first thought.

Michele Price, Nightshelter manager, said: “When we heard that some of the residents had started to call this particular day of the week ‘suicide Sunday’ we really felt that something needed to be done. Boredom, lack of social engagement and also lack of access to shelter and support services are all of course huge problems for our guests to deal with on any day of the week, but we felt that opening on Sundays would go some way to alleviate these issues on what is seen by many as a particularly tough and lonely day.”

She added: “We rely heavily on the help of volunteers to offer this service however, and without volunteer help we will struggle to continue our Sunday daytime opening, so we are asking anyone who is able to spare just a couple of hours of their time to please get in touch. They’ll be working alongside our staff team helping to make the tea, doing a spot of cleaning, folding some linen or simply chatting to our guests – the really important thing is that we have enough people on site to open up!”

Anyone interested is urged to contact the shelter directly by email admin@wcns.org.uk or calling 01962 862050.