TMSO

TMSO (The Mass Sleep Out) started life as a series of chats on a facebook anti-bedroom tax group Bedroom Tax…think its unfair…join the fight here around the idea of staging a an event.

The idea was that we should show the government the effect on homelessness that their policies on housing benefits, as well as other social security reforms, would have on the streets of the UK.

A few ordinary people decided to stop talking about it and do it. Between them they created a facebook event, created resources for other event hosts to use, drew up some principles for the hosts to follow and generally set in motion the structure for a national event. This was the 19th July 2013. We then started to publicise it across twitter and facebook.

People responded…

On the 24th August 2013 people in over 50 towns and cities across the UK were involved in holding sleep outs. Many of the events were organised and attended by people who had never organised events like these, with the help of other hosts

Pictures and videos can be seen here:

TMSO events across the country are set up by ordinary people showing that if we work together, we can make our voices heard and enable others to stand up for what they believe is right. We  also collect details from those that cannot attend the event but would if they were able, so that their name and message can be displayed at events. We call these sleepers by proxy.

We need your help!

The Mass Sleep Out is planning further rolling events at local level, along with co-ordinated nationwide events at specific points.

Although the initial TMSO event took the form of an overnight sleep out, we are keen to come up with other imaginative events.

Please see the event page for your location on this site. Clicking on the link will take you to that location where you can find out what the plans are in your location.

If there is no event currently planned for your own town/city,  you can contact us through the Facebook page. We can then offer support for anyone seeking to do so, including help & advice from other event organisers, promotional material to raise awareness of your event and important documents/statistics relating to the bedroom tax.

If you don’t wish to organise an event yourself – and even if you are unfortunately unable to attend a TMSO event – there is still plenty you can do to help. We are relying on word of mouth to spread the message of this campaign, so please talk about it to people you see and share on your social media accounts – using the hashtag #TMSO and the website t-m-s-o.org – to publicise the campaign as much as possible.