The BOAZ team is made up of a range of stakeholders: a full-time Project Director, Housing Manager, Communications Manager and Advocacy Coordinator; a part-time Office Manager, Hosting Coordinator and Night Shelter Coordinator; an active Board of Trustees; volunteers who work on frontline projects, as hosts, advocates, campaigners, befrienders or prayer supporters; and of course, destitute asylum seekers themselves.

Dave Smith – Dave is the founder and director of the Boaz Trust, and for many is the ‘face of Boaz’.  Dave is a man of real vision, driven by his Christian faith.  Alongside managing the Boaz Trust and hands-on work with clients, Dave is involved in a lot of awareness raising on a local level, and partnering with others to campaign on a national level.  Dave also set up NACCOM, a network of similar organisations across the country providing accommodation to destitute asylum seekers.  The aim is to share advice and expertise, and several new projects have emerged in other towns and cities as a result.  You can read more about how Dave set up the Boaz Trust below.

Nigel Biggs -  Nigel is the Housing Manager at the Boaz Trust.  He is responsible for the upkeep of our houses, and the welfare of the residents.  Nigel has been part of the Boaz team since 2006 and has a real heart for the marginalised in our society.   

 Jo Garbutt – Jo is currently our Chair of Trustees, and voluntarily coordinates our hosting programme.  Jo does a fantastic job recruiting new hosts, organising placements, and caring for the guests.  If you could consider hosting a destitute asylum seeker in your spare room she would love to come and chat with you!

Ros Holland – Ros is the Office Manager at the Boaz Trust.  She brings a wealth of experience and a friendly smile to the Boaz office.  Ros manages the admin and volunteers, alongside providing advocacy to our clients.

Rachel Todhunter - Rachel is our Communications Manager and is responsible for our fundraising, events and supporter relations.  She also oversees our Meaningful Lives project and provides individual care and support to our residents.

Ian Pollock – Ian is one of our most dedicated and generous volunteers.  He works full-time to help our clients to move on with their asylum cases through finding fresh evidence or applying for Section 4 support. Ian coordinates our advocacy team, an area of our we are hoping to develop.

Zygmunt Galaszkiewicz Vel Mlynarski - Zygmunt coordinates our winter night shelter, which provides a hot meal and a warm place to sleep to up to 10 men each night during the winter months.  Zygmunt is responsible for coordinating ths shelter, ensuring the welfare of the asylum seekers, and overseeing the teams of volunteers at the different venues.

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Profile: Dave Smith (Project Director)

Q: Dave, We first met through your involvement with the Mustard Tree, but I know you’ve had a real heart for the homeless for many years now. Tell me a bit about how that got started.

A: It all started back in 1992 when a friend of my wife Shona phoned & said “we do this soup run on a Sunday night & wondered if you might like to come along”. We had nothing else to do, & decided to go along to see what it was all about. All I can say is, we were instantly ‘hooked’. For me, it was as if I had found what I should have been doing a long time before. Helping people who were the most marginalised in society is always on God’s heart. We went along with the same church group for about a year, & during that time came to feel that much more had to be done. Serving out soup & sandwiches once a week didn’t really start to solve their problems, though the caring & befriending was valuable in itself.

At the time we were moving churches, & when we decided on the new church, we discovered there were some young people there who also had a heart for the homeless – so we started the Mustard Tree. Our first soup run was on Sunday 31st October, 2003. I can’t forget it, because it was the day after our daughter Jessie was born!

The Mustard Tree remained a Sunday night soup run staffed by volunteers for several years, though we did get charity status & improve the service by starting a small clothing & furniture store too. I had felt for a while that nothing would change unless someone stepped out in faith & went full-time into the work, so when I was offered the possibility of redundancy from teaching in 1998 I jumped at the chance to move on. The redundancy money lasted 4 months, which just gave us enough time to get some funding in place, & then we moved into an old mill building in Rusholme. It wasn’t long before we had lots of clients coming through the door with all sorts of needs, from furnishing an empty flat to clothing their 6 children or feeding themselves while they waited for their benefits to come.

Our first asylum seeker came through the doors in 1999. I had no idea what an asylum seeker was, much less where they came from or why they were here. It was a very steep learning curve! Within a short space of time other asylum seekers, refugees & refugee organisations had discovered that the Mustard Tree was providing free clothing, bedding, furniture & household goods, & a small trickle of refugees turned into quite a fast flowing river! By 2003 60% of our client base were refugees.

At the same time we became aware of the growing number of those who had been refused asylum & were now homeless & destitute. Our food store was being rapidly emptied, & when the Red Cross talked of setting up a Destitution Project, we jumped at the chance to enter into a partnership that still exists today. Between March & August 2003 the number attending the Destitution Project on a Thursday afternoon went from 15 to 85. Even the setting up of another project in Salford failed to decrease the numbers,& by 2004 it was getting obvious that the project was getting too big for the organisation to handle, particularly as the trustees were unsure about the Mustard Tree moving into the accommodation sector. There were already people who were hosting destitute asylum seekers.

As my contract at the Mustard Tree came to an end, & the new contract offered was only part-time, I felt God giving me an almighty (in both senses) hint that it was time to take another leap of faith – & so the BOAZ Trust was born in April 2004. Thanks to the encouragement & help of the leaders of my church, South Manchester Family Church (especially Colin Baron & John Owen), we were able to hit the ground running. The church suppoted me financially whilst the Trust was set up.

Q: What have been some of BOAZ’s early successes during this start-up phase?

A: I think the main reason why BOAZ has come so far in such a short space of time is down to the support from my church & others whom I had come to know & love at the Mustard Tree. The trustees are a great bunch of people who are amazingly caring, supportive & hard-working. Their faith in me as a person means that I am free to pursue the vision & aims of the project without having to justify every action taken. At the same time, their own commitment means that I can’t do anything daft without their knowledge!

People always ask me, “How is it going?”, & I always answer with a guarded “Yeah, it’s going well, I think”. On the positive side, there are 28 people in accommodation who otherwise would be destitute. That’s 28 people who have begun to rebuild shattered lives. And there are another 50 or so who have moved on after a while being hosted or residents of our houses. So that’s good. But there are also another 75 on our waiting list, & it’s growing daily.

I think another very successful thing, though it’s only early days, is the ‘Meaningful Activities’ programme we are developing. It’s one thing having a roof over your head – & without it everything else is fairly impossible – but what can you do with your time if you are not allowed to work & have no access to education & no money? Things like our gardening project, & producing quality ethnic Christmas cards, are vital for people’s dignity & self-worth.

And then there is the quality of our volunteers. It’s a real privilege to work with such fantastic people. I can’t imagine any other job that I could say that of!

Q: How do you keep from getting swamped by the scale of the problem?

A: Sometimes it does all get a bit much, & I think about being somewhere there are no asylum seekers, & where the weather is nice all the time. (I think it’s called ‘Heaven’!). On Thursdays I know I will be face to face with several desperate people who have nowhere to sleep that night. It’s much easier, when they are on the end of a phone, to say “Sorry, but we have nothing”. But I’m learning to cope. First of all I have to realise that I’m not in it on my own. There’s a lot of other people, not just within the project, who have the same heart. And then there’s God. I feel enormous sympathy for those who do this sort of work & don’t have God in their lives. I guess that’s why 80% of this sort of work is done by Christians. And then, what’s the point of worrying? Like Jesus said, it’s not going to alter a thing, except the colour of my hair (what’s left of it).

The job can be frustrating. It’s frustrating that so few people know anything about the human tragedies happening in our own land. Even the Church is still largely unaware of the problem, especially if Christians read certain tabloid dailies! There is, however, real encouragement in seeing wonderful asylum projects popping up all over the country. So we have to keep on educating the Church first, then the rest of society, until enough people stand up & say “That’s enough!”. I guess Martin Luther King, William Wilberforce & Lord Shaftsbury all faced the same dilemma, so, though the scale may be different, we can take encouragement from the ultimate successes they achieved, with God’s help. And yes, this enforced destitution is probably the greatest social ill since slavery was abolished 200 years ago, so it is in the same league!

Q: What are your hopes & dreams for BOAZ?

A: That the UK becomes a welcoming society for those who are fleeing persecution. That refugees are believed unless it is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that they are lying. (That’s how the rest of the the legal system works). That all destitution & homelessness is eradicated in our country (that includes those who aren’t seeking asylum!) That, when that happens, BOAZ can start to do what it should be doing – helping those who have full refugee status to become fully integrated into a society that loves & cherishes ALL its members.