With the Covid-19 pandemic driving unprecedented changes to the nature of the national and local response to homelessness and creating exceptional momentum and progress, it certainly feels like the right moment to be launching our new strategy. We have seen that things can be better; we believe that they should be better still - and this gives us hope for a different future.
As the membership body for the homelessness sector in England, we feel it is important that we help lead the way on shaping ongoing positive change. Our relationships and work with you, our members, puts us in a unique position to understand the issues and identify the solutions to homelessness.
With our strategy, we now have a current roadmap laying out how we intend to achieve a different future, with a particular focus on the people, provision and issues where clear gaps in support exist, and on the things that are within our power to influence. I am excited to share this with you all.
As you will be aware, Homeless Link’s approach has always been to actively seek out partners and work collaboratively wherever possible, including with people with lived experience of homelessness, and we look forward to continuing in this vein, working with you all in this latest phase of our mission.
Also very important to us in this work is that we are fully committed to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and stand against all forms of discrimination. Homeless Link aims to embed EDI across all areas of our culture, structure and our work, and to this end, we have co-produced an EDI Strategy to sit alongside this plan (available from June 2021).
Our strategic priorities for the coming three years have been established following extensive consultation and are heavily influenced by our members’ experiences, as well as the current pandemic. They are aspirational in that they require change both in our own work and that of our members.
We want you, our members to come with us on our journey as we strive to achieve:
- Home Safe where everyone has their own front door and can feel safe and secure in their accommodation
- People First so that individuals experiencing homelessness are given the right support to meet their needs and aspirations and improve wellbeing
- Prevention into Action that targets our efforts and resources further upstream to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place
- A Stronger Voice that amplifies the experiences of our members to create opportunities for shared learning and challenge systems that aren’t working
Together, we hope to end homelessness for good and help create positive futures for all individuals experiencing homelessness or living in vulnerable housing situations.