Aviva staff sleep on street to highlight child homelessness issue

May 21 2010 by Denis Brown, Perthshire Advertiser Friday

AVIVA employees will be sleeping rough outside the insurance giant’s Perth offices tonight – but they haven’t fallen on hard times.

The 45-strong contingent, which will include the company’s UK insurance chief executive David McMillan, are not the latest casualties of the ‘credit crunch’.

The ‘sleep out’, a fund-raising and awareness exercise, is part of Aviva’s nationwide Street to School initiative that aims to help vulnerable and homeless children get off the streets and back into education.

Perth-based head of HR operations Sandra Scott said Aviva had teamed up with the Railway Children charity to tackle the plight of an estimated 100,000 UK children who run away from home or care every year.

She said prior to the sleep out concept being floated – which has a fundraising target of £6000 at the Pitheavlis office – she and her colleagues had no idea child homelessness was such a hot topic in Perthshire.

“We honestly thought that it wasn’t a big problem locally, but the digger you deep the more you realise just how widespread an issue it is, not just in Perth but in Dundee too,” she said yesterday.

Staff at Perth – and at nine other UK Aviva branches – will check in between 7.30pm and 9pm tonight, tooled up with sleeping bags, blankets and cardboard for insulation, ready for what will likely be a restless night.

“I think we’ll be getting cups of tea around 10pm, but apart from that we’re on our own,” she said.

“Obviously it’s not comparable with sleeping in your own bed, and it will be cold and strange – I’ll be with people I work with but I’ve never slept with them before!

“I’m not a camping fan, it’s not my thing, hence the reason I can’t quite believe I’m doing this, but at the end of the day, it’s for a very good cause.”

Railway Children chief executive Terina Keene said the Aviva partnership would help bring about a greater public awareness of the distressing issue of homeless children and their needs.