Christmas is a challenging time of year to experience rough sleeping and precarious housing situations. It's cold, hectic, and many services close or scale down over the Christmas holiday period. Our pop-up day centre runs from Christmas Eve for seven days. It provides festive food, community, activities, and essential wellbeing services. The week long project takes months of planning and coordination; it's an incredible response from the people and businesses of Bristol (and beyond) who don't want people left out in the cold at Christmas. Our volunteers and supporters are critical to the success of the project, demonstrating that many people share our view that homelessness, and how we respond to it, is an issue for all of us. Our impact reports can be downloaded below!

2025 Impact report available below!

Two team leaders, one white woman and one Black woman, smiling during volunteer duties

2025: at a glance

You can find more detail in the 2025 impact report below.

  • 437 volunteers did 855 shifts and gave 3739 hours to the project.
  • Comments and feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
  • In a guest survey about their experience...
  • 43% talked about the great food - “It's going ok now that I'm warm and have eaten.”  
  • 26% talked about being able to socialise - “Great, love the social atmosphere.”  
  • 30% talked positively about volunteers and staff - “I feel very welcome here.” DOWNLOAD CARING AT CHRISTMAS IMPACT REPORT 2025 (PDF)
“Better for having come here!”   (Guest Feedback)

Download older Christmas Impact Reports

These provide more detail about our most recent years' impact (PDF format)...

Caring at Christmas Impact Report 2024

Caring at Christmas Impact Report 2023

Caring at Christmas Impact Report 2022

Caring at Christmas Impact Report 2021

Caring at Christmas on TV & Radio

Watch and hear various broadcast media pieces about the project; gain a  behind the scenes look at this iconic Bristol project. We're grateful to our broadcast media supporters for their fantastic, thoughtful coverage!

Caring at Christmas in the Media

We're looking forward to creating more impact in 2026...

donate here

[Header / page photography by Alice Hendy]