Brand New!

All of us here at Watford New Hope Trust are thrilled to announce that we have simplified our name from four words to two! From today, we will be known as…

…<drum roll, please>…............... NEW HOPE!

Many have used this abbreviation since we began; however, as we move into our 25th anniversary year, a number of reasons led us to feel that the time was right to make the abbreviation official. One of our reasons for this change is due to the growing public confusion between Watford New Hope Trust (WNHT) and other similar-sounding organisations, such as Watford Community Housing Trust (WCHT). We are very different organisations, yet the names are similar enough for us to receive a rising number of misdirected enquiries. Also, although the vast majority of our work is in Watford, we work with people from across Hertfordshire – notably our tenancy sustainment team support people in the boroughs of Dacorum, Hertsmere and Three Rivers.

Changing our name is not a decision that we have taken lightly and we have given this much prayerful consideration. We remain guided by our original vision and, in reference to our co-founder Janet Hosier’s memoirs, Entertaining Angels, we read the following, which reminds us that the most significant part of our work was and is ‘Hope’:

Now that we were a new charity we needed a new name, so Sheila, Tim and I all went off to pray. When we met up to discuss some possible ideas, we all realised we were thinking along the same lines: hope. We had all read the scripture from Jeremiah in which God promises that he has plans to give us ‘hope and a future’, and we felt this was a really important part of what we wanted to offer anyone with whom we worked. We became Watford New Hope Trust – feeling that ‘New’ added strength to the title and conveyed the message we wanted to get across.

As well as simplifying our name, we have also changed our strapline from ‘Hope for the Homeless’ to ‘Preventing Homelessness. Transforming Lives’. Again, this change remains true to our foundation, but we are moving away from using the phrase ‘the homeless’, which is now seen throughout the sector as derogatory and dehumanising. From saying ‘the homeless’ we now join our peers in using the phrase ‘people who are homeless’.

The outcome of this renaming process is marked by a modern, simple logo, which highlights that home is at the heart of all we do. We hope you will agree with us that these important changes continue to reflect our values, our mission and our aim.

On a final note, we wish to assure our supporters that this ‘rebranding’ process has not been a costly exercise, as it may be for some organisations. Our new logo and publicity items have all been created in-house, by our small Fundraising and Communications team and a local printer is supporting is in keeping cost to an absolute minimum. Also, the timing of the rebrand appeared to be right, because we had run out of most of our old literature!

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