Making Every Community Asset Count: Improving Health and Reducing Inequalities for People Experiencing Homelessness

As well as sleeping rough, people who are homeless may live in shelters, hostels, and temporary or unsuitable accommodation. Before becoming homeless, people have often faced sustained periods of severe difficulties, which are both a cause and a result of poor health and wellbeing. The longer or more often people are homeless the worse their health becomes and the harder, and more costly, it is to get their life back on track.

To tackle homelessness, people need equal access to housing, healthcare, education, employment, and opportunities to grow, develop skills, and live healthy and fulfilling lives. Many health and social care providers, public services, and community-based organisations are committed to improving health and reducing health inequalities. Yet despite their efforts homeless people often find themselves unable to access and engage with the services that might be able to help them. Services tend focus on solving crises in housing, mental health, and addiction for example but often come with criteria such as complete sobriety or stability in mental health, which are difficult to meet. In addition to this, services are often not as good as preventing further issues. When available, support for homeless people is often only for a short time, not coordinated with other services and fails to meet all of a person's needs. While most services see people who are homeless as having lots of needs, few also see them as people with strengths, talents, resilience, and aspirations.

Creative health approaches (art, crafting, cooking, gardening, sports, singing, reading, writing, and more) recognise people as complex and multifaceted, with spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical needs. However, despite evidence showing the positive impact of creative initiatives, these assets have not typically been considered a core part of support services.

This project aims to grow the care system, so it includes creative health approaches and learns to support people better. It will be led by people with experience of homelessness, and using participatory methods, will be organised in five work packages (WP) to:

Understand the impact of trauma on people's experiences, their homelessness, and how they have been enabled to access support (WP1);
2. Understand what creative approaches work, how and for whom (WP2);

3. Develop a network of care services, to include creative health approaches, and encourage them and people who have been homeless, to learn from each other (WP3);

4. Use creative approaches to challenge stigma around homelessness (WP4);

5. Work with decision makers in the North East North Cumbria to ensure that services work together to prevent and tackle homelessness (WP5).

In addition to sharing the findings in academic papers and conferences, we will shape policy, practice and research. We will use creative methods to amplify the voices of those experiencing homelessness and celebrate the strengths of individual and community assets. We will share our findings nationally and internationally for maximal impact.