A barber is helping the homeless – by venturing into the streets and giving them free HAIRCUTS.
Hairdresser Joshua Coombes, 28, is hoping his actions will help make a difference and influence people to help rough sleeps.
He was inspired after a trip to New York, where he saw a professional hairdresser cutting homeless peoples hair, and decided to give it a go when he returned to Exeter, Devon.
Despite working full time in Jeff Goodwin’s salon in Exeter, Josh often finds himself dealing with queues after work, when he helps the homeless.
While he started off with just one or two cuts a night, now Josh struggled to fit in all his new clients, and cuts up to seven heads of hair a night.
Josh and his photographer friend, Matt Spracklen, have recently set up camp in city centre, and hope to inspire others to be generous.
Josh said: “Today we did seven haircuts which is great, people would often walk by and before you know it we had a queue forming and there would be someone else that wanted a haircut.
“For me, it is about giving something back and raising awareness of the homeless and by doing it on the street, it breaks the generalisation and so far it has been a good response.
“It has started to bring people together.”
“Today someone from the Cathedral came out and brought everyone a coffee, doing something good for nothing really wakes people up.
“It is just me giving up a bit of my time, it is a great experience and it is really humbling for me.
“The reason I started doing this is because when I was in New York, I saw a guy doing the same thing and it really inspired me to do something.
“It is easy to just give money to charity, but it is even more rewarding to create awareness.”
