Megan's Story
I first started using Nightsafe when I was 16 and quite rebellious and asked to leave my family home. I stayed here in the shelter until Nightsafe staff helped me
Read Megan’s story here:
Megan's Story
I’m Megan, and I’m a senior support worker for Nightsafe’s Anchor Avenue project. My job, honestly, it feels more like family than work. It’s like a home away from home. So I come down to Anchor and I work part time, so I do every Sunday into Monday. The young people will come down and we’ll have a chat. And honestly, I feel like that’s my job role. There’s more to it and there’s the paperwork side, but it is very much like each project is one big family. I love it because I work on a Sunday, so I love it when all the young people come downstairs and we can all sit together and watch a movie and make hot chocolates and just spend time together. It just is really, really lovely and we all are quite close.
I first started using Nightsafe when I was 16 and quite rebellious and asked to leave my family home. I stayed here in the shelter until Nightsafe staff helped me secure a place at the foyer in Blackburn. I lived at quite a few different hostels, but throughout the time I was always accessing the Day Centre downstairs. The staff were always amazing. And again, the I get now as a support worker at Anchor, I used to feel, when I was using the services myself, because I would come and I always felt involved, I always felt cared for.
If I had nowhere else to go and I just needed a hug, I knew that I could come here and I’d get exactly that. I have two children now and one of my children is actually named after a Nightsafe staff member who helped me completely turn my life around. At 16, 17, 18, I started using drugs and alcohol quite heavily. And Nightsafe, they have changed my life and I’ve always known that I wanted to work for Nightsafe eventually, but to be honest, I’d never thought that I would achieve that.
At 21, I had my eldest daughter. I would still come and I would show her off to all the staff and the staff would still let me pop in and say, hello, hello. Have a brew and a chart. So I used the Nightsafe Day Centre Platform 5 for five years, from 16 to 21. At 20, when I found out I was pregnant, I was. I panicked. And this was the first place that I came because I knew that I would get the best advice. And it did. And I got amazing advice. I have a notebook at home that Hayley used to work here, wrote a list of baby tips and tricks and I still have that at home. Yeah, I’ve kept that because I treasure it because it was just a lovely thing for her to do.
Nightsafe is family. That’s what they mean to me. I hope that other young people can feel that way too. Because if Nightsafe and I myself now working for Nightsafe, can do the good work that Nightsafe did for me, that would just be an amazing feeling, you know, if I can help young people to feel as loved and as cared for as the staff did for me, then I’ve done my job. So, yeah, 10 years of Nightsafe and whole lifetime’s gone.
** Images shown are not of actual person to protect their identity.
