St Vincent de Paul Winter Appeal 2025

St Vincent de Paul Winter Appeal 2025

This winter, Vinnies volunteer members across Australia are seeing an unprecedented demand for homelessness services and support.

Homelessness – or even living with the constant risk of homelessness – can have a lasting and insidious impact on people’s lives.

Homelessness can expose people to violence, victimisation and poor nutrition.  And people who have experienced homelessness are more likely to report having a mental health condition or a long term health condition.

These impacts can affect people’s future prospects in education, gaining and maintaining employment, and connecting with their community.

 Our parish conferences have had a long history with providing support to those in need.  Last year marked the 170^th anniversary of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Australia with the Victorian Conference being established at St Francis Church, Melbourne amid the chaos of the 1850s Gold Rush – and just 20 years after the society itself was founded as a Catholic lay charity in Paris by a young university student named Frederic Ozanam.

This week our Camberwell Conference – which was established in 1907, predating the opening of the Basilica of Our Lady of Victories – reflects on their work to help people break free from their cycle of poverty and homelessness.

Since the establishment of the Camberwell Conference, our volunteer members have been providing emergency assistance to people in need in the local area – thanks to the ongoing and ever generous support of our fellow parishioners.

Several times a week our members visit people in the local area who have sought our assistance, helping as required with basic supplies, food vouchers, furniture needs and utility bills.

But it is not just about providing material assistance, important and all as that is. When you step into someone’s home and spend time listening to their story you are offering something that cannot be measured – a genuine connection that tells them that they are not alone.

The need today is as great as it has ever been – in the past 12 months we have helped well over 100 people in the local area with assistance worth in excess of $13,000.

Together with our colleagues in the Deepdene Conference, some of our members also make similar visits in North Melbourne and Collingwood as part of a wider outreach program.

What sort of circumstances are encountered on our visits? There are

• those fleeing domestic violence (often with children), who have found emergency accommodation but who have no furniture or household essentials
• the socially isolated person who had got herself into financial strife through injudicious use of After Pay type services   
• the type-2 diabetic in his fifties who needed some funds urgently for medication – but who had pawned his phone for $100 and had had to pay $135 two weeks later to redeem it; and                                                                               
• the recovering addict in his 30s who basically just wanted someone to lend him a sympathetic ear.

Conference members endeavour to help these people – and many more like them – to the extent that we can, but  we are only in a position to do so because of the on-going generous support of our fellow parishioners. 

It is your compassion and support that makes our work possible.  Financial donations play a critical role in sustaining the Society.  The annual Vinnies Winter and Christmas Appeals are the primary local fundraising activity of our Parish Conferences.

On the weekend of 21-22 June, our parishes’ St Vincent de Paul Society will hold its annual Winter Appeal.  A special collection will be taken at each Mass over that weekend and proceeds will help fund the Society’s work for the year ahead. Those works are wide ranging and targeted to assist those in need both financially and socially, as explained by the Society’s State President, Michael Quinn, in this short video prepared earlier this year as part of National Volunteer Week. 

Our Conferences are always looking for new members to assist in our work.  If you are interested in joining or finding out more about the work, please contact the Conference President(s) – details can be obtained from the Parish Office.

Donations may be made direct to your applicable Parish Conference by visiting their donation page using the link or QR code below.  .

Together let us try and break the cycle of homelessness and poverty.

Camberwell Conference

Deepdene Balwyn Conference

Surrey Hills Wattle Park Conference

Source and Image:  St Vincent de Paul Society Australia