Jared & Helen Hodgson run Hope at Home, a charity which facilitates a hosting scheme for survivors of human trafficking across the UK. They believe that the church family is the ideal setting for someone to find freedom, be loved and accepted and discover who they were made to be. They train and support Christian hosts and churches to welcome survivors into their homes and facilitate the placements between safe houses, survivors and hosts. Working alongside other agencies, they are fighting human trafficking in the UK both practically by providing accommodation so that survivors are not re-trafficked and in terms of being part of the wider UK solution.
Stories from Jared and Helen
After months of hard work, we received our charity status in January 2018 and are already (March 2018) training three hosts in different parts of the UK. We had aimed to have 5 active hosts in the first year, so this is very exciting and an answer to prayer.
God has opened doors that we never expected to be opened. We set up this hosting scheme to fill a huge gap in provision of support and accommodation for survivors, but in doing so we have discovered that nobody else in the UK is doing this and so we are in demand with other agencies who want to work with us and see a rapid expansion of all we are doing. We have been approached by those working with the Home Office to be part of a wider solution to this issue and are constantly stepping into the unknown!
Living without salary can be scary, but God has continued to provide for our needs including most recently a second car so that we are able to get to meetings and make visits without it impacting our taxi service for our boys!
Prayer Points
Please pray for funding for the project and for our salaries. We are living on an ever decreasing redundancy pot and are applying for funding but this is very time consuming. This is now both our jobs and if we have to look for other jobs, we won’t be able to run this. We also need money for the project to actually function! Please pray God continues to provide for us.
Please pray for more hosts. It’s exciting to see God digging out those people with big hearts and spare rooms, but the need is huge. Last year the need for for 5,000 people. We have come to Jesus with our few loaves and fishes and know without a doubt that he will make a way for these 5,000 people to be fed and loved but it is so big that only he can make this happen.
Please pray for volunteers. We need volunteers for admin, for filling in funding applications, for writing blogs and keeping the website up to date and for manning stalls at events.
Please encourage us! It’s often a lonely journey and we often doubt and feel discouraged. But we know God has called us to this and made a way for us so we continue to trust him.