Bill Crews has been helping the homeless for five decades

Reverend Bill Crews has been helping disadvantaged Australians for more than five decades. He can hardly believe his work has continued for that long – not that he plans to slow down any time soon.
Crews, who celebrates his 80th birthday today, loves his work. He just can’t believe it is still needed.
“It makes me annoyed in a way, because so many of the things we are seeing now, we were seeing way back in the ’70s when I started, and I thought all those things would be sorted by now,” Crews tells 9honey.
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“Of course, I was a bit naive I think.”
Crews wasn’t planning a public celebration of his milestone birthday, but was convinced to go along with it all to help promote the Reverend Bill Crews Foundation which continues its important work with a dedicated team.
Crews’ work began with the opening of the Loaves & Fishes Free Restaurant in Ashfield in Sydney’s inner west. It now feeds the homeless in multiple locations.
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He began at the Wayside Chapel in King’s Cross where he ran the social works programs before expanding his work outside of the church. He says they were “overwhelmed with need from homeless and youth.”
“In the early days it was young kids, 11, 12-year-olds, who were homeless and they’re still homeless today,” he says.
“We picked up kids sleeping in the parks, all over the place, because it was safer being on the street than at home for them.
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“So that’s scarred my life,” he continues. “People don’t realise the average age of death for a homeless person is about 60.
“One of the things I’m doing now a lot with very young kids is trauma therapy because if they’ve been through trauma in their lives as young children, they can’t learn at school. So you work through the trauma with them and then they can survive at school and they can go on and change the world, and that’s one of the outcomes we’ve been working on.”

While Crews feels government could do more to assist disadvantaged Australians, his overwhelming message is one of love and acceptance: The Bill Crews Foundation doesn’t turn anyone away.
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“That’s what we do,” he says. “Our mission is whoever’s in front of us.
“So somebody turns up, we pull out all the stops to help that person. And that means we end up in a whole lot of different places. Like just yesterday this young fella turned up and he was a really nice young man and he said, ‘I’ve been sleeping on the streets and all I’ve got are the clothes I’m in.’
The young man was hoping for a shower and was given toiletries and some clean clothes.
“And to him, that was a whole new world. But we’ve got away from that. We’ve got away from seeing how vulnerable we all are.”
He worries that average Australians are turning away from problems like this.
“I think as a society, we’ve gotten more isolated and more anxious and in a way more lonely,” he says.
“People are so worried about their own situation, they haven’t got much left to look outside of themselves as well.
“And yet, it’s going to be by looking outside of themselves that a lot of this change goes on.”
Today, Crews is on a plane to England where he will participate in a march.
“We do a big march of all the people who have recovered,” he explains.
“We get 16,000 or 17,000 people to march to show people you don’t have to be a slave to your addiction. You can actually get over it.”
As for celebratons, he says chocolate cake his is favourite but is hoping he won’t be sent hundreds of them, as has happened before when he’s mentioned something he’s liked.
“I’ve got to be careful because once on the radio I said I couldn’t find an egg cup and I got four million,” he says.
“But I could give them away.”
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