Icon: more useful research from Intelligent Giving
    A sunflower

The quiet ones:
St Mungo's and Thames Reach

THESE ARE TWO of the biggest London-based homelessness charities – but most people haven't heard of them. That’s because they get the vast majority of their funding from government and therefore don’t spend much time asking the public for money.

They both do pretty similar work, getting people off the streets and into long-term accommodation. They run hostels and supported housing schemes, and provide training and other help for homeless people getting back into mainstream society.

There are some differences. Thames Reach (see profile) puts more emphasis on sending teams of people out onto the streets to talk to rough sleepers and get them into hostels – where they can then use the rest of the charity’s services. St Mungo’s (see profile) is also a big 'outreach' provider, but it places more emphasis on the wide variety of training and education schemes it provides.

Do they deserve your cash? That’s a difficult question to answer. Neither is registered with the Charity Commission (they have a special ‘exempt’ status, making them answerable to other bodies), and this means that their annual reports aren’t easily comparable with those of most charities.

However, Thames Reach has a notably more transparent annual report and review than St Mungo’s. But it’s also worth pointing out that government inspectors recently said St Mungo’s services were “good and had promising prospects of improvement”.

> St Mungo's website
> Thames Reach website