Extreme Sleepout for Centrepoint

One of our Rescue 2 technicians, Ollie Laker, will be taking part in a daring, hair raising challenge in a bid to raise £20,000 for youth homelessness charity Centrepoint.

Ollie (IRATA level 3 qualified rope access and rigging specialist who has worked with the BBC on Planet Earth 2 and more) along with two other adventurers Phoebe Smith (extreme sleeping adventurer and author) and John Pike (rope specialist and award-winning A&E doctor who set up the UK’s first canopy training courses for forest researchers and film-makers) will be taking part in ‘Extreme Sleepout’.

The trio will be spending ten hair raising nights sleeping suspended from famous landmarks across Britain. The adventurers will sleep high in the sky on small platforms called portaledges, rigged and suspended from the different sites over ten consecutive nights. The challenge will take them to a mixture of man-made and natural structures, from the northernmost reaches of Scotland to the southern shores of England.

Centrepoint is the UK’s leading charity for homeless young people. It supports over 9,000 16-25 year olds into housing and employment every year. Working directly in London and the north of England, Centrepoint's work covers all of the UK through a network of 40 partner organisations. Centrepoint’s work is about more than just a bed; the charity provides specialist health support and help to access education and training, so that young people can go on to live independently and leave homelessness behind. 86% of the young people Centrepoint supports move on positively.

The team say: “All the sleepout venues are supremely iconic in one way or another and getting the permission to sleep in them all has taken months of planning and stress - in fact we’ve never worried about where we will be sleeping quite like this before in our lives - which, we suppose, is somehow fitting for the challenge. It will be a real physical hardship getting to some of the places we need to get to and scary too to spend the night at such heights and in all weathers. But even if doing this stops one more person having to sleep somewhere cold, wet and miserable, then it will be completely worth it as far as the three of us are concerned.”

The challenge will be taking place from the 20th - 29th June 2018.

You can follow all the action as it takes place on social media with the hashtag #ExtremeSleepOut and on @PhoebeRSmith and @CentrepointUK for live videos and updates.

To support Ollie and the team, please make a donation to this worthy cause via their Just Giving page.

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/extremesleepout

Best of luck to Ollie, Phoebe and John.