Alex Smith, Homeless Link's Head of Innovation and Good Practice introduces her team and their priorities.
From my early career as a legal advisor to working in frontline services, I have always understood the importance of practice in our efforts to end homelessness.
Since joining Homeless Link nearly seven years ago, I have been involved in delivering a wide range of practice programmes, including Housing First England, work on women’s and youth homelessness, and innovative projects exploring modular housing and Critical Time Intervention. Throughout that time, I have been driven by a simple belief: improving practice is crucial to ending homelessness.
I am therefore delighted to be stepping into a new role as Head of the Innovation and Good Practice team at Homeless Link. .
Our new name reflects both the work we already do and our ambitions for the future. The Innovation and Good Practice team has a clear mission: to support the sector to understand, implement and develop the approaches that will help end homelessness.
We do this in two key ways:
- Raising standards of practice across homelessness services by supporting organisations to implement approaches that we know work.
- Exploring and developing innovative solutions that can drive transformational change in how homelessness is prevented and addressed across England.
Good practice and innovation go hand in hand. While we must continue to embed existing evidence-based approaches, we must also be willing to test new ideas, challenge assumptions and find better ways of responding to emerging needs.
A homelessness system that works for everyone must recognise that people’s experiences of homelessness are not all the same. Much of our work focuses on understanding different routes into and out of homelessness and how services can best support people with diverse experiences and needs. This includes our work around young people, women, LGBTQ+ people and migrants, helping to ensure services are responsive, inclusive and effective.
We are also interested in how place shapes experiences of homelessness. Good practice in a major city can look very different from good practice in rural, coastal or smaller communities. London has some particular challenges with pressures around housing affordability, temporary accommodation and rough sleeping.
The sector is also facing a period of significant change. Increased regulatory oversight and growing expectations around service quality are reshaping the environment in which organisations operate. Our role is to help services navigate these changes while maintaining a focus on learning, development and continuous improvement.
This work is strengthened by our close partnership with colleagues across Homeless Link, particularly our Policy team. Good policy and good practice should inform one another. By bringing together evidence from frontline services, lived experience, research and policy development, we can help ensure that national conversations are grounded in what works in practice.
As a membership organisation, listening to and engaging with the sector is fundamental to our work. The team chairs national advisory groups, supports homelessness forums and delivers practice events that create opportunities for connection, discussion and shared learning. These conversations help us understand the challenges facing the sector and identify opportunities for change.
Innovation sits at the heart of everything we do. For us, innovation is not simply about inventing something new. It is about finding better ways to solve problems, improve outcomes and respond to changing needs. Sometimes that means testing new approaches; sometimes it means adapting and improving existing ones.
We are also interested in how new funding approaches, including social investment, can help organisations develop and scale promising solutions. While there is no single answer to ending homelessness, creating the conditions for innovation is an important part of building a stronger system.
Homelessness is one of the most complex social challenges we face. If we are serious about ending it, we need both the confidence to build on the evidence we already have and the courage to explore new possibilities.
That is the role of the Innovation and Good Practice team. As political ambition to end homelessness continues to grow, we want to help the sector identify opportunities, develop solutions and translate innovation into meaningful change. I am excited to lead this next chapter and look forward to working with members, partners and people with lived experience as we continue our shared mission to end homelessness.
