In the Beginning ……

The true revolutionary is guided by love. It is impossible to think of a true revolutionary lacking this” – Che Guevara.

I can’t think of anywhere else to start but the beginning…….

I’m writing a blog as that seems to be the done thing these days since carrier pigeons went out of fashion. As we are already on Facebook and Twitter we thought we would do a blog to get a hat trick (many more football related puns to come). Let me introduce you to Jon Regler (that me!!), the founder of our organisation (the dude in the picture with the moustache)

It all started with a passion for football and a desire to make a difference both of which I have. I attended the Homeless World Cup in Milan in 2009 and worked there as a volunteer. I returned with inspiration thinking as the Homeless World Cup has said “a ball can change the world” So why can’t a ball change Oxford?

Already a football coach, I searched for a local homelessness project that i could get involved with. I was lucky to find Lucy Faithful House ( a supported housing project for homeless people provided by Two Saints) and began to assist them in coaching a football session once a week. During that time a couple of questions kept popping up from the players. “Why can’t we play more football?” and “what can we do the rest of the time after the football has finished?”

I began to dream that maybe he could start an organisation that would answer these questions.

Fed up with calling it ‘I have a dream’ or ‘that thing I want to do with football and adults that are marginalised in the county blah blah blah…..’ we had to think of a name. So at 2 am in the morning (when all great ideas come about) Becca and I (that’s me the “blogger”) came up with a few suggestions. Here are some of those that in a Britain’s Got Talent sort of manner got the red buzzer treatment…….. Balls to Homelessness (too rude)…..The Big Issue (already taken)…Bend it like a beggar (so politically incorrect which rather defeats the object)….. as you can tell we didn’t work well at 2am in the morning and our waste paper bin was very full. We learnt from our naming session that was reminiscent of Gynneth Paltrow like (who names their child after an apple anyway!) and started thinking again the next morning. We liked Streets United it combined both football and homelessness brilliant! until you type it into google and realise that every Tom, Dick and Harry thought of that way before us. So after a couple of weeks of running around telling everyone its Streets United it dawned on us we are trying to inspire change so whats the biggest kind of change there is …… a revolution. This brought us to the word “revolution” (from the Latin revolutio, “a turn around”) defined as “to bring about a change”.

So now we had a name time to focus our attention on starting the organisation and so the story continues….