Preventing Homelessness

In order to end homelessness, we need to prevent people at risk of homelessness from losing their grip on housing in the first place.

This requires these people being identified early and effective strategies to divert them away from homelessness and into housing that is safe, secure, affordable and permanent.

Our work to prevent homelessness

We prevent people from becoming homeless on a daily basis through many of our services. This involves helping people to sustain their public, private or community housing if it is under threat and assisting people to find alternative housing where necessary.

It is quite common for people to become homeless when they are discharged from hospital or to be refused bail due to having no fixed address. We work with government systems like hospitals, the justice system and mental health services to prevent people becoming homeless when they leave these systems.

We also do research and advocate for reforms to ensure that groups at risk of homelessness can be identified early in mainstream systems like education, health and child protection.

If we wait until people become homeless, we are not only exposing them to the damage of life without housing, but we also make it much harder and more expensive to help them out of homelessness and back into permanent housing.