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Homelessness is a community issue. Learn more about the challenges people face, the role London Cares plays within the broader homelessness response, and how you can add your voice in support of Housing First and lasting solutions.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQS)
London Cares Homelessness Services works with people experiencing homelessness in London, helping people move from street to home through relationship-based, Housing First services and supports.
London Cares has a specific role within a broader homelessness response that also involves governments, health and social services, community organizations and other partners.
London Cares provides frontline supports to people experiencing homelessness, including supportive housing, housing stability services and housing focused support services.
Our teams build relationships, respond to immediate needs, help people navigate services and support people as they move toward housing and greater stability. Housing is the goal.
Housing First means helping people experiencing homelessness move toward permanent housing and connecting them with the supports they need to build stability. London Cares works from a Housing First approach because housing is the goal of our work.
Our teams build relationships with people experiencing homelessness, respond to immediate needs and help them navigate complicated systems. That can include helping people complete required documentation, verify income and become ready to be considered for housing through London’s coordinated system. London Cares also works with shelters, the Coordinated Access team, the City of London Housing Stability Services team and other agencies in the homelessness system.
Our staff bring practical frontline knowledge of the challenges people face and the services and supports that can help them move forward.
London Cares works with people experiencing homelessness using a trauma-informed approach and provides support based on the needs of the individual. Our role is to build relationships, respond to immediate needs, help people navigate systems and support pathways toward housing and stability. Housing remains the goal.
Homelessness is a complex community issue, and no single organization controls the entire homelessness response. London Cares has a specific role within a much broader system involving governments, health and social services, community organizations and other partners. Our frontline teams work directly with people experiencing homelessness and help them move toward housing and stability. Progress depends on many parts of the system working together.
ABOUT HOMELESSNESS
Developing our new strategic plan during the pandemic highlighted the importance of communicating the complexity of homelessness. It can happen to anyone. We recognize many people do not understand what it means to experience homelessness, how the daily experiences of violence when living on the streets compounds existing trauma, and what it takes to achieve safe, stable, supportive, affordable housing. This is especially true of individuals experiencing homelessness who have complex needs, such as serious physical or mental health concerns, addiction, and trauma. That is our niche as an organization: to work with individuals experiencing homelessness who have underlying trauma, the most complex needs, and experience the greatest degree of marginalization.
The pandemic also revealed our compassion as we came to see one another as individuals, shifting from an attitude of “we’re all in the same boat” to recognizing not everyone’s boat was the same and, in fact, some in our community struggled to find a boat. This challenge continues – to see there is not one face of homelessness in London, but many: the veteran haunted by memories of combat, couples who cannot find work, single parents caring for their children, individuals struggling with untreated mental health and addiction, individuals who are new to the streets, and individuals who have lived on the streets for years. The stories of homelessness are multi-faceted, requiring community connection and community action.
Working in our niche is not just about providing appropriate services and supports. It is also about shining a light on homelessness and helping to build widespread support to solve homelessness. This means doing our part to support the City’s initiatives to solve homelessness and championing a broader understanding of the challenges and diversity of homelessness in London.
Communicating the complexity of homelessness requires curiosity, care, and vulnerability. It asks us to see the person experiencing homelessness instead of pretending they are invisible and to sit in the discomfort of privilege as we learn from people with diverse life experiences. It requires data and the perspective of lived experiences to inform discussions, and it invites us to build empathy as we connect beyond the issues to the people. It helps us see that offering a bottle of water to someone living on the street is more than nourishing the body; it is initiating relationship. The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of the importance of human connection. Sometimes those connections start when we say, “Hello,” offer a small kindness, and begin a conversation. In those moments, we are humanized and become visible to one another.
These community conversations about homelessness are vital, fostering a powerful virtuous cycle: sparking community support for sustainable action, encouraging a shift to seeing homelessness as a failure of systems rather than individuals, decreasing the stigma of homelessness, helping to move individuals experiencing homelessness from the margins of society and re-membering them as part of the wider community, and mobilizing our community for action. Through these generative conversations, we will catalyze our community’s work to solve homelessness in London.
It’s hard to turn a corner when you live on the street. Further, the longer you experience homelessness, the more you are marginalized, the more invisible you become, and the more difficult it can be to access support, especially if that support crosses multiple organizations and systems. At the micro and macro levels, homelessness interventions do more than “get people off the streets”; they identify and address the interwoven issues that prevent someone from being or staying housed.
Our current systems struggle to provide coordinated responses for individuals experiencing homelessness, especially individuals with the highest acuity (i.e., individuals with the most complex needs and greatest degree of marginalization). While many organizations are working to solve homelessness in different ways, our challenge to effectively and efficiently coordinate means individuals can fall through the gaps. As we work to reduce system duplications and provide effective and efficient supports, we must take a population-based approach to solving homelessness, reducing inequalities in health status between population groups and generating equitable solutions with respect to housing, safe spaces, and basic needs.
Collaboration and coordination are essential to build sustainable systemic solutions. Finding such solutions requires creative thinking, a willingness to innovate, and deep listening and dialogue among all actors in the system – community leaders, service providers, individuals with lived or living experience of homelessness, community members, and allies.
At London Cares, we will continue to explore promising practices to better assist individuals experiencing homelessness with high acuity. We compassionately meet people where they are at, adapting with agility to provide responsive service delivery with imagination, resilience, and grit. We are committed to helping individuals who cannot access services elsewhere by developing safe spaces to meet basic needs, such as resting spaces, shelter, food, and washrooms. We are also committed to being strong systems partners, focusing on the population we serve, advocating for their needs, and being part of and championing a systems response to homelessness.
As we seamlessly integrate supports and services, we will continue to work across systems and sectors, dialogue with partners, and amplify the voices of individuals on the margins of our community. In building seamless supports from street to home, we will foster greater equity for individuals experiencing homelessness who are highly marginalized so they, too, have choices, supports, and experience belonging.
EDUCATION AND ADVOCACY
The resources below provide more information about homelessness.
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