behind the counter x Ben Silvey
This week, behind the counter we are exceedingly delighted to have Ben Silvey, Director of the YMCA Bristol. A good Samaritan, a youth worker and a compassionate leader, Ben has dedicated the past sixteen years in helping and supporting vulnerable young people in a financially sustainable way. Two years ago, The Bristol Wing Hostel was born, a journey that we are absolutely moved to know about. The concept behind the hostel is one that is truly admirable and valuable. A fantastic backpackers hostel on the surface, which helps with funding for the young homeless who stay in the same property and are provided employment opportunities. But that’s not all, The Bristol Wing also has two dedicated chaplains to help and support them too, and of course, also their guests!
Tell us more about your story. How did you start your Journey with YMCA?
Yeah, well, that’s a question! I probably got involved with the YMCA fifteen–sixteen years ago because I lived in a community in Bristol where the YMCA used to be very active and then it had sort of reduced to not doing much for various reasons. So as a local part of the community, I went along to their meetings to find out more about the YMCA and that’s how I ended up becoming a trustee for YMCA Bristol.
I’m a youth worker, so I have worked with young people all my working life. Helping to give them opportunities, give them things to do, places to go, introducing them to people they can trust, basically things that can help them get out of a difficult situation. And so as a trustee of the YMCA, what we were really trying to work out was what we should be doing with the organization that houses and happens to be the heart of so many young people. We wanted to look at how we could provide safe places to stay for young people that are homeless. So you know, we wanted to start what we call these days a “social enterprise” which is a very normal thing but those days it was not quite as normal. We want to house young people in places that were not sort of “ghetto”, where they weren’t stigmatising homeless young people by lumping them all together and so we then went on a very long journey of trying to work out how to open a hostel in Bristol.
The money we make from the commercial backpacker’s would pay for the homeless people’s beds
On the face, it would be a fantastic backpacker’s hostel, but behind the scenes, we’d be providing beds to the homeless in the same building. The money we make from the commercial backpacker’s would pay for the homeless people’s beds and this gives them an opportunity to be part of this amazing community of travellers where they wouldn’t feel fairly anonymous and invisible amongst them and wouldn’t be labelled by virtue of something.
We still have that vision and we’ve been through various off-routes to get there, but in about 2013, we found a building in Bristol city centre which was perfect for a hostel. It was an old police headquarters that had been empty for the best part of thirty years really, but it’s a beautiful building! It was built in the 1930s, very artsy-décor-y, but still a really solid, lovely building in the centre of Bristol city. It is right near the Bristol main bus station and not far from the train station, with plenty of shops nearby and a few minutes walk to the harbour; basically all the good stuff in Bristol. So we then had to work out how we were going to buy it, and how we were going to fix it. I wouldn’t describe it as derelict, but it needed complete refurbishing. So we have had to work out where we’d find the two million pounds to refurbish it as well.
In 2013, I stood with my boss and looked at this building and between the two of us decided we should just buy it! And we wanted to do it in a way that meant that we didn’t have to rely on funding from the government or the local authorities because that was a bit of an insecure dependency and it came and went, we wanted to earn our own money. So we went to the bank and asked to borrow some money and they miraculously lent it to us without much of a hassle, because of its plan. And so at various points along this journey with YMCA, rather than just being a trustee of the YMCA, I now work for the YMCA as a paid member staff.
How is the YMCA Bristol Wing different from other YMCA hostels?
I guess in India or Germany or the UK, you’ll see very different sides of the YMCA. Even in the UK, you can go to twenty different YMCA properties and you’ll see twenty different things. In the UK, they don’t generally do commercial backpackers accommodation in the way it does maybe in other places. I’ve stayed in their properties in San Francisco and then Auckland, but in the UK, YMCA doesn’t really do that very much.
The Bristol Wing is very close to Bath YMCA (sister hostel), and they’ve done it for years and years! They’ve had backpackers in Bath for the best part of thirty-five years and so we merged with them and that was fantastic but what we wanted to do was, I guess, was less think about differentiation with the YMCA and more think about differentiation of what else was in Bristol. It is just such an amazing city. It’s full of interesting buildings. There are loads of brilliant hostels already, so many amazing bars and clubs.
There’s an amazing hostel on a boat on a harbour called Kyle Blue Hostel which is brilliant, so a lot is going on already. We had to kind of work out how we fitted into the marketplace. We just wanted to create something that was really beautiful and with the building giving that sense of feeling of being at home and a sense of community. Lots of the hostels in Bristol tend to be party hostels, so they’re attached to bars and clubs. Or they tend to be longer stay hostels where people working in Bristol for a couple of years might come and live for a year or two.
But actually, what we wanted them to feel was, if you come to the Bristol wing you’ll get a good night’s sleep. You’re still on the doorsteps of all partying if you want it, but when you come back here at four o’clock in the morning, it’s going to be quiet, and it’s going to be safe and calm. Also, by spending your money with us, you’re helping homeless people and you might even bump into someone homeless in the building, and maybe that’ll change your perceptions of what homelessness is and whom a homeless person might be. So yeah, I guess that was kind of our niche; ethical-sustainable-social-community hostel, which I think you’d agree is a snappy way of describing it!
Has there been any kind of challenges when providing opportunities to the homeless people, considering the trauma some of them have experienced in the past?
Before we opened up, we were part of the Bath YMCA already, and YMCA institution has lots of expertise in this kind of thing. The young people that we take in who experienced homelessness, and who are now staying with us, would be where most of our energy is invested in if you like. But in reality, those young people that stay with us are the real radiators of energy! They’re the ones that motivate us. Surprisingly, the hard stuff to deal is with the commercial side of the hostel. All the stuff that is the more difficult bits that I know I couldn’t pretend to you that doesn’t happen in our hostel or any other hostels for a matter of fact. There is such vast diversity of people who come through the doors on a commercial basis. There are sometimes people that come and stay with you that maybe shouldn’t be staying with you or maybe aren’t suitable to stay with you and you have to manage those situations and that’s the bit that is trying.
I think people who run hostels are heroes!
We’re lucky with housing the homeless, though. I mean, there’s been some people that stay with us who have had some heart-breaking stories. Trauma upon trauma in their lives, layer upon layer of things that happen which ended up making them homeless. It’s hard to hear and hard to support them sometimes and but we’ve got a great setup, we’ve got two chaplains who work for us. They are dedicated to supporting the whole hostel actually but obviously focused on the displaced people mainly. They’re just incredibly skilled, gracious, lovely people who make that bit work really well. They organise a weekly meal called ‘the feast’ where a big meal is cooked for everyone in the hostel to partake in. Running a hostel twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week where you’ve got young homeless people in there or whether you’re just commercial hostel is hard work, really! I think people who run hostels are heroes! Haha!
Is The Station Kitchen part of The Bristol Wing? Can you tell us more about it?
We actually opened The Station Kitchen before we started the hostel. Sadly, it is closed now; we closed it at the end of last year. So that was actually our first step back as a social enterprise at the YMCA, we opened it in 2012 and ran it for 7 years. After we opened the hostel, we thought it would really work well with the hostel. That there would be lots of breakfast souls, but actually we just didn’t have the capacity to run both bits well. So we decided to close The Station kitchen which is sad, but we have had seven exceptional years! And that was a social enterprise for all young people there as trainees and volunteers, and so that was great. It was lovely, but we had this choice of — do we keep doing two things not as well as we want to or do we focus on one? And if we had someone give us a hundred and fifty thousand to kind of invest in the business, I think we could have done it! Haha. But as it was, we sort of had to make a tough choice. It was tough in some ways because we lost staff and some of them were friends, but in other ways, it was clear that the hostel worked better and really benefited people, and was financially robust.
It was the right thing to close the kitchen, and that gave us space to really focus in on how to better the hostel. In the first 2 years of running a business, you’re still learning, you’re still kind of making stuff up, you’re still trying to work out what you know, and what mistakes you’ve made and why. And if you are always fighting fires and never had the time to step back and reflect, then you never really learn. So closing The Kitchen just gave us more time to be able to just really understand how to do better. And you know again, hands down, I’m sure some customers have come to us and told us they didn’t have the best experience (hopefully most of them had the best experience). But we want to really understand how to do the best job we can and ensure we have the resources to do it.
How is the hostel coping during the pandemic outbreak?
Well, we had the same situation as everyone else did at the end of February this year and the beginning of March. The commercial trade just disappeared, so travellers weren’t coming to the UK or those who were here for a while, could not go home. The internal travel market collapsed too, people weren’t travelling around and everyone suddenly stopped everything to be on the safer side. And that hit us. In a span of two-three weeks, our commercial trade just disappeared completely and our core purpose is around helping with the homelessness problem.
And so we were left with nine young people in the building who were homeless, and at that moment we would entirely depend on commercial travellers to pay to keep the building open and to keep it running. So we were trying to work out what on earth to do and we had a conversation with our local council (our local authority in Bristol) and they were having a situation where they had the responsibility to take every single homeless person off the streets at Bristol within the span of three days and place them somewhere! So we mutually came to the decision that we would essentially just pause The Bristol Wing as it was and would lease the building to Bristol City Council. They would then use it for housing homeless people within its entirety. It would be given over to homeless people, and the council would run it. They had lots of homeless people who were either on the street or were living in shared accommodation or shelters, and so on. Because of the pandemic and social distancing, everyone had to have their own bedroom. So we had twenty-seven rooms in our hostel, which normally had eighty-eight beds in whole, but in this circumstance, it was one bed per room. So they could place twenty-seven people there, and the council has leased it from us until the end of March next year.
So we are the Bristol wing paused in its old form, however, the building is still being used for that purpose that we wanted it to be useful for. It’s such a beautiful building, has beautiful furniture, beautiful rugs, and an amazing lobby. Now twenty-seven people are living there and experiencing something slightly unusual as a homeless you know than the streets of Bristol. We’re pleased that the council is using it for its original purpose and are also paying us rent, they’re being very generous to us. So that keeps us afloat in the meantime and we look to the spring of next year to see if we can reopen.
I think in the hostel market (certainly in the UK and Europe), there are still some big questions about how viable is the hostel market particularly. We have buildings in real estate that are dependent on lots of shared rooms, shared accommodation and dormitories. At the moment, we can’t offer any shared accommodation. It has to be family groups coming or only six people who know each other. This winter, we don’t know what’s going to happen. In spring 2021, we feel it will be over by then and we will be in the position to open, but actually, we don’t know and we’re not sure really what’s going to happen. The mission and the vision are still there, and we still have this amazing building. We’ll start planning for that and we’ll start looking at how we can recruit our new team, but there are so many unknowns in the world at the moment and we’ve been lucky to have the resource to pause without losing the building.
What’s your favourite memory of community life? and what advice would you give aspiring hostel owners?
My most positive memories.. sound like ages ago, haha, but anyway, my most positive associations of being in the Bristol wing are when I’m sitting in my office and towards the end of the day, like five-six o’clock in the evening and when I’m ready to go home, I walk out and as I pass the Kitchen lounge area, I’m always hit by the genuine sense of community. There are diverse people from all walks of life, young and old that are staying with us and being around each other, moving around the kitchen borrowing pans from each other, sitting around the table sharing food, laughing, conversing, some are watching TV or listening to music.
You don’t get to feel this sense of community in many other places like hotels, where everyone sticks to their own bubble. But in hostels, you kind of experience something of people who go there because they want to share, they want to understand how other people exist; they want to understand other cultures and other beliefs, and that to me is such a precious thing in the world at the moment! Especially where we’ve become like a tribe and not defined by our differences. When you see what’s happening in America, in the politics there or the UK with Brexit, and all those kinds of things, it feels like a little bubble at a hostel where people really want to be at together, and want to understand each other and be alongside each other. That’s what hostels are all about to me!
The advice I would give somebody who wants to start a hostel is to do it when you’re young!
The advice I would give somebody who wants to start a hostel is to do it when you’re young! It’s also the energy, I mean I’m forty-three now, I opened the hostel when I was forty-one and it wore me out. Fortunately, we had young people in the team who were far more energetic, and just generally far better than I am, and they kept the whole thing going. So yes, do it young, and hire energetic people, by which I mean get brilliant people; five people that you trust or five people that are better than you and build it with them. A team you can trust is so important because you’ll depend on people to be there at three-four O’clock in the morning when you aren’t there and you need people to represent your values and to embody the sense of community and to really live and breath what hostels are all about. So you need good people cause you can’t be there all the time and shouldn’t be there all the time, a great team can really help each other achieve a good work-life balance.
