European End Street Homelessness Campaign: December 2017 update

It is two years since the European End Street Homelessness Campaign began and much has happened in this time! We now have 13 cities working as part of the campaign to end street homelessness.  In November we held our Annual Gathering of cities and spent two days sharing experiences and plans for moving forward. Athens, Bratislava and Sheffield have all joined the campaign following the event.

In 2017 the campaign has celebrated various big successes including the implementation of five housing first homes in Valencia and 16 people out of the 29 who were met in Torbay’s Connections Week have been helped into secure housing.

We have also seen many different positive actions taking place with Connections Weeks in Torbay, Barcelona, Brussels, Croydon, Brighton, Alicante and Leicester. These events have really demonstrated the idea that homelessness can be solved if the community gets together and we have met hundreds of fantastic volunteers who continue to support the campaign.

Some of the progress in cities includes:

• In Leicester and Brighton, the Connections Weeks and results will help inform the Leicester Homelessness Strategy and the Brighton and Hove Rough Sleeping Strategy.
• In Brussels they end the year with the launch of a citizen challenge where volunteers will be trained to help find suitable housing for those on the streets.
• Barcelona and Croydon are now focusing their work on influencing local decision-makers and Croydon will hold a public event in January 2018. Croydon is also working on developing a by name list of all people sleeping on the streets.
• In Alicante we were left with the sad news that one of the men spoken to during the week had passed away the next morning. This tragic event demonstrated the urgency and need for the campaign’s work to continue.

We also commissioned an evaluation of the campaign building on our 2016 evaluation. You can read the report here. We will now use this to inform our plans for 2018 and look forward to working further to end street homelessness for good!