The NishkamSWAT team are tackling homelessness head on

It’s quite hard to make the entire Be Kind team speechless, but after paying NishkamSWAT a visit one Thursday evening, we were all lost for words. Co-founder and global operations director, Randeep Singh, and team leader, Tan Bajaj, invited us to help them provide fresh, piping-hot food to the homeless people of Colchester. We packed up our donations, slipped on our blue gloves, and got to see first-hand what this heart-warming organisation is all about. Randeep took a moment to give us a little more background on the amazing work they do.

We started of in 2008 as a community organisation to educate the youth about the dangers of drugs and alcohol – it was so prevalent in our area. Southall is a very diverse community in west London – in fact, it’s known as the heroin capital of the UK. Myself and a few others wanted to ‘do our bit’ to help because we have a spark within us which encourages us to want to make a difference. We are a faith-led organisation; we are Sikhs, we live by our values, but we will not preach. We also have the word ‘Nishkam’ in our name, which means ‘selfless’, because everything we do is totally and utterly non-missionary – we’re not here to convert people, we’re here to help them.