Mr Motivator faced homelessness as a single dad. It’s now driving his crusade to give children beds

We are used to the image of Mr Motivator clad in garish Lycra, working out on telly. We are less familiar with the image of Mr Motivator, campaigner against bed poverty.

At 73, Motivator, real name Derrick Evans, launched Mr Motivator’s Bed Bank, aiming to get beds for some of the 900,000 children in this country who do not have one of their own. He wants bed poverty to be recognised as a national crisis.

It is a drive rooted in personal experience. In 1973, Evans had just moved to London with his wife and young daughter and found himself homeless. Every morning, they’d get sent to the bed and breakfast they had been allocated.

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“There were about five families, all sharing the same bathroom, the same kitchen. That was probably the lowest point of my life, because it was horrible. My wife and I broke up. It was really rough and I ended up looking after my daughter on my own when she was about two years of age,” he says.

The first bed they had, he recalls, consisted of bedsprings under a mattress. “I wouldn’t put my worst enemy on that mattress,” he says. “The council didn’t give you anything – they gave you a room and you had to sort the rest out.”

As befits a man who goes by the name Mr Motivator, he took this to be a positive experience. A chance to grow. “I learned a hell of a lot. It got my survival instincts right up to the top and it meant I did everything that I could. One minute I was cleaning toilets in Tesco, next thing I was stacking shelves in C&A. I did whatever I had to do. Didn’t matter. I had to look after my daughter and that was the important thing for me.”

Back in 2026, and he’s trying to push the issue up the agenda. “For me, bed poverty, I want to see that as two words that everybody in the future will recognise,” he says. “I want to make sure that we talk about bed poverty just the same way we’re encouraging men, especially, to talk to reduce the likelihood of mental problems. I think it’s the same thing. I want kids to feel comfortable talking about bed poverty and not be worried that their friends are going to judge them.”

Step one is to create awareness, step two is to get donations for the Bed Bank, and step three is to get that money out to charities who can identify kids in need of beds. Beyond that are plans to create a specialist cleaning machine to stop mattresses going to waste.

To Mr Motivator, giving children somewhere to sleep feels like a no-brainer: “If this was highlighted on television on a regular basis, and we saw a child crying and saying, ‘I need a bed’, all of us would stand up and do something about it.”

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