Today, the UK’s leading homelessness theatre company Cardboard Citizens supported by local and national charities including; Crisis, Shelter Scotland, Cyrenians and The Museum of Homelessness launched Citizens Do, a campaign to challenge Edinburgh Fringe audiences to no longer be bystanders to homelessness.
The campaign calls on Fringe audiences to take a series simple actions to improve the lives of those experiencing homelessness in Edinburgh and across Scotland. Participants who sign up to support Citizens Do will receive three daily actions ranging from the personal to the political, from buying a homelessness person a cup of tea, to signing a petition to call for the creation of a formal, unified approach to recording homeless deaths in Scotland.
Citizens Do runs alongside Bystanders, a new production at the Fringe by Cardboard Citizens which tells the true-life stories around homeless lives and deaths and the causes of both. After last year’s revelations by The Bureau for Investigative Journalism on the largely unreported and unrecorded scale of homeless deaths in the UK – with the staggering reality of 800 homeless men and women having died between October 2017 and March 2019 – Bystanders gives those unheard voices the stage in true-life stories told with authenticity, wit and sadness.
The combined objective of Bystanders and the Citizens Do campaign is to challenge audiences to no longer see homeless people as invisible, or consider homelessness as an inevitable problem. Audiences are called on to take direct action collectively to improve the lives of homeless people, to be more than just a bystander.
Jon Sparkes, Chief Executive, Crisis, said:
When some people are struggling, it has an impact on our whole society – and when people are dying because of homelessness, we know things have to change. That’s why it’s imperative that we all work together to end homelessness for good. The Citizens Do campaign inspires us all to take action – whether that’s stopping for a chat with someone sleeping rough and offering to buy them a coffee or sandwich, or tackling the root causes of homelessness. We know that homelessness isn’t inevitable – and together, we can end it once and for all.
Citizens Do is live now, CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
The Fringe campaign is a development of an award-winning campaign launched by Cardboard Citizens at Soho Theatre, in which audience members and others sign up to receive a series of simple actions to improve the lives of homeless people. The first iteration of Citizens Do won the 2019 Best Digital Campaign award at the National Campaigner Awards, given by the Sheila McKechnie Foundation.
Bystanders runs from 31st July – 25th August, 11:30am, Summerhall (Tech Cube 0)