Crisis at Christmas centres opened across London from 23-30 December 2010 and offered a wide range of essential services to the homeless including health care, dentistry, eye care, hot meals, clothing, computer access, work and learning advice. The goal was to provide homeless guests with a secure place to help alleviate the loneliness and isolation during the Christmas period, as well as provide a vital advisory service for benefits and social services support. This year, Crisis expected more than 2,500 homeless guests to visit their 10 centres across London, and hoped that for many it would be the first step towards leaving homelessness for good.
Intercept was part of a core IT team brought together by the Aimar Foundation which included thin client manufacturer IGEL, technology specialists SCC and key technologists, project managers and logistics specialists from Morgan Stanley. The project enabled Crisis to offer essential IT services to its 8,000 volunteers over the Christmas period as well as providing Internet and computer access to the 2,500 expected homeless guests that could be used for writing letters and accessing valuable web resources for building a better life.
Terry Knott MC, Chief Executive of the Aimar Foundation, says, “We are enormously pleased to be assisting Crisis again, for the third year running and could not ask for a better partner in this operation, than Intercept. The company is superbly professional and shows a ‘can do’ attitude to all its work with the Aimar Foundation. Aimar looks for innovative solutions, to give smaller charities a step-jump in capability and Intercept’s expertise enables us to do just that."
Intercept’s onlinedesktopTM is an ideal solution for this type of deployment. Low cost equipment was installed in the Crisis centres, and all of the desktop operating systems, applications and data were delivered and managed centrally and securely from Intercept's data centres as a public cloud service.
“We are very proud to be providing our Online Services to help support the Crisis at Christmas project for another year,” said Gary Collins, CTO at Intercept IT. He continued, “Intercept has extensive experience providing services to charities and fully supports Aimar’s goal of providing corporate grade IT services, which reduce costs and improve efficiencies to the not-for-profit sector.”