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New Fund | 'Incubating' Great Practice with Homeless Link

New Fund | 'Incubating' Great Practice with Homeless Link

New Fund | 'Incubating' Great Practice with Homeless Link

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

St Martin's Charity is proud to be supporting the brand new Homelessness Incubator Project, being delivered by Homeless Link from 2023-26. The project focuses on discovering and supporting emerging and promising practices across the 4 nations and internationally.

Through this project, we will be able to identify, amplify, nurture and test emerging and promising practices, from organisations and projects working to improve outcomes for people at risk of, or experiencing, homelessness. This initiative makes manifest the first pillar - "The funding that we provide is evidence-led" - of our recently announced Theory of Change, developed in order to more tangibly respond to the issue of homelessness and support people to secure and keep a safe place to live. 

The project will emphasise deep understanding, broad amplification, and long-term impact. That will mean working at times alongside service providers to gain an active appreciation of how the practice works and the impact it is having. It will mean providing others in the sector with the opportunity to learn from the successes and challenges that have been faced, so that promising practices can be replicated across the country. And it will mean refining our learnings to make the case for further investment in practices that could be piloted or robustly evidenced.

Sergiu Sidei, who is leading the project at Homeless Link, explains in more detail:

"The challenges of homelessness and especially of rough sleeping are very complex. Those who work tirelessly in our sector represent the very definition of "heroes". Every day and night, they're out there on the frontline, or busy planning in the background, continuously striving to make impactful changes, even when the circumstances are less than ideal. The resilience demonstrated by these individuals is unparalleled, especially knowing how they often make a difference, with very limited resources.

What's even more inspiring is that among the harshness of daily challenges, innovative solutions are emerging. This isn't just from the brainstorming sessions of policy makers or strategists, but from those who've faced the harrowing experience of homelessness themselves or the homelessness frontline staff.

Our commitment to addressing homelessness is globally inspired. This is why we've been actively exploring and incorporating successful strategies from around the world. This includes Housing First, where we have learned a great deal from our colleagues in Europe, and trauma-informed practice where we have looked to North America. The successes of global initiatives have further cemented our belief that homelessness, while a universal challenge can be tackled due to the collective efforts of our sector.

We are always on the lookout for great examples of positive practice and now have a greater opportunity, through our Homelessness Practice Incubator project, to dedicate time to discovering, exploring and sharing these positive practices with the sector.

With the support of St Martin-in-the-Fields charity, we're gearing up to discover, explore and platform more emergent practices during the next three years. Our goal is to unearth the most promising, innovative practices from the UK and around the globe and disseminate them within the homelessness sector. It's going to be an action experiment. We're optimistic but also grounded, understanding that not all ideas will be home runs. Yet, even in those moments of setbacks, we see them as learning opportunities.

This is a great chance to reflect, share your practice with others and remind yourself and our colleagues in the sector what we should be proud of. Let’s work together towards shaping a future where homelessness might become a thing of the past."

We are looking forward to learning about more innovative and potentially game-changing practice examples. Please fill in the form below.

Enter your innovative practice now

Or if you want to read more about how Homeless Link spreads best practice visit this page.

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