A CHARITY boss has spoken of how his fundraising campaign work has helped to raise awareness, as well as money, to tackle homelessness.

The StreetSmart campaign enlisted restaurants to ask diners to add an extra £1 to their bill in the run-up to Christmas. This extra £1 goes to a homeless charity.

In the case of south Essex, that charity is Harp.

Glenn Pougnet, who is the director of the campaign, and his team are counting up what this year’s fundraising drive raised at the campaign’s offices in Clerkenwell Road, London. Last year, it raised £610,000.

But as well as raising money to help the homeless, Mr Pougnet, who grew up in Kents Hill Road, Benfleet, and studied at St Thomas More High School, in Westcliff, says the campaign is also about raising people’s awareness of the problem.

He said: “Even though I lived in the area when I was growing up, I was ignorant to what was under the surface in Southend.

“Towns like Brighton and Bristol have similar problems and coastal towns generally often have an issue with homelessness, but, where local restaurants want to give something back to the local community, that’s where it works.”

Mr Pougnet left Essex soon after graduating and chanced across the role through a career in publishing.

He said: “I went to university in 1992 and, after my studies, I moved to London, where I got a job in publishing.

“The guy who ran the company I worked for also started this campaign to help the homeless.

“Years later, I was looking for a change and he suggested I take it on.

“We looked to grow it further and got Deutsche Bank to cover our costs, then got it out to cities outside of London.

“This is when Harp came to us and asked if we could help them do the same thing in Southend.”

The charity campaign has been replicated in towns across the country.

Mr Pougnet said: “What it’s led to is expanding into smaller towns, as opposed to just larger cities.

“A charity in Wakefield, for example, has adopted the same model, where they started to recruit restaurants themselves, rather than us having a paid agent in the area, and Nottingham and Bedford have done something similar on the Southend model.

“It works for both of us really well because we can’t justify employing someone just to raise something like £5,000, but the charity might already have strong links with restaurateurs and we provide the mechanism for them to raise the money.”

The campaign’s biggest fundraiser in Essex is the Grove, in Belton Way East, Leigh, which has raised £2,200 of the £5,000 he is hoping to have raised in the county."