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After years of opposition a church hall in Braddon will open its doors to homeless men for crisis accommodation on Wednesday. The Safe Shelter pilot program will be run out of the St Columba's Uniting Church hall from May 15 until September 25. Safe Shelter's plan to accommodate homeless men was initially opposed by the government last year, when then Community Services Minister Joy Burch voiced concerns over health and safety requirements, in particular adequate fire protection improvements. The Safe Shelter Management Committee confirmed that an inspection of the electrical works in the hall was conducted on Tuesday and a Certificate of Occupancy and Use was granted, allowing them to open the hall for overnight crisis accommodation. Currently 17 volunteers for the overnight shifts and three volunteers for the early evening shifts have received training. Another training course will begin on Thursday and already more than 10 people have registered their interest. The Safe Shelter program requires three volunteers, including at least one male, each night the hall is open, as well as an early evening volunteer from 7pm to 10pm and a volunteer on call. Ria Percival was encouraged to volunteer by her daughter Ainslie Jelic, who first began volunteering 12 years ago with her mother in the Griffin Centre soup kitchen. "What appealed to me was that it's practical. We're going to give them one night a week where they're warm and safe," Ms Percival said. As the former head of the ACT's Australian Bureau of Statistics Census unit, Ms Percival said the homelessness issue had been important to her for a long time. "It's such an affluent city that it's surprising to see the amount of homeless people who are here," Ms Percival said. When she took on the role she was concerned that previous censuses didn't seem to reflect the reality of the homeless situation in Canberra. "I was really passionate about how badly they enumerated homeless people," she said. To ensure the figures were as accurate as possible for the 2001 census she worked closely with mission groups and soup kitchens to get a better understanding of the scale of homelessness in Canberra. More than 1200 homeless were recorded in the 2001 census, but that number increased over the years and the most recent figures in 2011 had 1785 Canberrans listed as homeless. The first group of volunteers has taken part in two training nights and an administration night run by the co-ordinator of St Benedicts Community Day Centre, Elaine Lollback. Ms Percival said the training had been comprehensive and included information about additional services they can direct the homeless to. "They're quite committed to making sure the volunteers are comfortable and know what they are doing," she said. "But to do this you have to have some degree of confidence that you can handle it and also a huge amount of understanding of people, because they're homeless, they're not criminals, they're just people who don't have anywhere to live. "If we get more than we can take that will be really hard because by law we have to turn them away." Verity Alexandra decided to volunteer with Safe Shelter because her life had been altered and touched by people in crisis. "It doesn't take much to go from leading a normal life, or an apparently normal life, to being homeless," Ms Alexandra said. "It can happen to anyone." Ms Alexandra agreed that the volunteers feel prepared ahead of the first night of the program. "We've certainly got plenty of back up support – we have lists of other volunteers if people can't come, people on the committee who can be called any time of night, and police can be called," she said.

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