Carolyn Hayman’s life story, and the strong sense of care that has been present throughout, has echoes of the foundation of C4WS as a charity. Her involvement in tackling homeless began in the 1970s, volunteering with the Quakers on the UK’s first ‘Open Christmas’ initiative. “I took out my A to Z,” she recalls, “and drew circles around all the little crosses. Then I got on my bike and drove around all those churches, asking if they would consider having lots of homeless men come and sleep in their crypt for Christmas.” The Quaker pioneers she was with ran four such projects, one of which was at Holy Cross Church in Cromer Street, King’s Cross.

Some thirty years later, C4WS emerged from the successes of group running the very same kind of church-based shelters, later adding support around health, wellbeing, housing and immigration advice too, becoming one of London’s foremost such services, and now catering to for over 300 people per year.

“My father was a refugee from Germany,” says Carolyn, “so I think the whole family always felt particularly engaged with the kind of issues faced by refugees.”

She settled in Camden in 1971, buying her first flat thanks to the reparations the German government had paid to her grandmother. “Back then, Kentish Town was super cheap and had been for nearly 100 years due to the filthy coal-driven train lines they cut through it,” she says. “If you look at the census for the house I’m in now it was built in 1870, but within 10 years it had become multiple occupations. The neighbourhood pretty much remained at the bottom of the housing ladder until relatively recently.”

In 1984, Hayman and her young family moved in to the address she still lives today, where the previous owners had fostered children – and animals. “The whole house smelled of baby goats!”, she laughs, “and the garden was full of animal bones.”

She took on the role of Chief Executive at the Foyer Federation, picking up an OBE for her work finding accommodation employment for young people, before moving on to co-found the charity Peace Direct, which supports local people in conflict zones to achieve long-term peace.

Along the way she also donated a kidney to a stranger, and gained her first experience of offering a roof to someone in need as part of the sanctuary student programme for SOAS, where she had studied for her Masters.