Final Research Report Now Available
Our research report is now available to download for free. Click on the front cover below to open a PDF version:
There is also an ‘interactive’ version of this report on the issuu website.
The research team is proud of this work and this is due in no small part to a few other people who helped to make it an attractive and visually appealing document: Ciara Leeming provided the photography and you can learn more about Ciara’s work here; Eric Tilley designed the report and you can see more of his work here; and, Brookes Printers in Stoke printed high-quality hard copies which were disseminated among our partner agencies in the city and elsewhere.
Would you use a rough sleepers helpline?
I’ve done a little Twitter research and, with help, identified a few of the barriers to members of the public utilising rough sleepers helplines. Here is how I have interpreted them:
- Members of the public are perhaps unlikey to understand how outreach teams operate
- Frequent sight of large numbers of rough sleepers may mean someone is less likely to report it (in large cities, for instance)
- Fear of rough sleepers (personal safety issues)
- Belief that reporting person would have to approach rough sleeper
- Belief that the rough sleeper would have to appear to be distressed
- Not knowing that there are rough sleeper helplines!
- General apathy toward rough sleepers and the perception that other members of the public feel apathetic, too
- Wariness of outreach teams’ intentions (eg. news reports about doorways being hosed down to prevent rough sleepers returning - a ‘clean up the streets’ agenda)
I would welcome any more comments and suggestions. Please add to the box below and I’ll tag on to the list.
Thanks to @a6ruled @ana_au_ @hankarbutty and @SHUSU_research for help with this!
By the way, rough sleeper helpline numbers can be found here.
For more info about No Second Night Out, visit here. Evaluation of NSNO, including the rough sleeper helpline service, can be found here.
Photograph by Ciara Leeming
The Homeless Film Festival Exhibition
The Homeless Film Festival is a national event designed to showcase the creative talents of people have been homeless themselves or for anybody who wishes to raise awareness of the issues surrounding homelessness. The Festival also includes an art exhibition and, as we having been working on a graphic novel about homelessness as an output from our research, we decided to submit some images.
This one is a full page from the story of Becka where we learn about her self-harming brought on by her family stresses at home, her despondency at school, and the arrival of social workers in family life:
This second image shows two standalone images from two different stories. These two images represent what we refer to as the turning points in their lives. The top one is from Billy’s story. His life was almost taken from him in an explosion when he was on tour with the army in Iraq. Unfortunately, many of his colleagues and friends were not as lucky as he was. The image below that one is from Scott’s harrowing story. The image represents an incident of sexual abuse in childhood which led to his exclusion from his family, periods of rough sleeping, and many other challenging episodes of his life…..
These images and the works of several other talented artists are on display at the Homeless Film Festival Exhibition at the Kings Arms, Salford until the end of April. I hope you get the chance to see them.
Creating Opportunity for Homeless People in Stoke-on-Trent: A Networking Event
On the Friday 25th May, we will be holding an event in Stoke with our partner organisations and inviting private, public, and voluntary sector representatives to attend.
The event will discuss the opportunities for businesses in Stoke-on-Trent to get involved in creating opportunity for homeless people. On the back our research examining the complex life histories of people experiencing homelessness, service providers in Stoke wish to establish new partnerships with businesses that have ambitions for a socially just and inclusive city.
The event will be chaired by Sara Williams from the North Staffs Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Also speaking will be Gill Brown (Chief Exec of Brighter Futures), Dr Phil Brown (University of Salford), and Tony Oakman (Stoke-on-Trent City Council).
We anticipate the event to be of interest to representatives from local businesses with new or existing commitments to policies of corporate social responsibility.
The City of Stoke-on-Trent is nationally recognised for its exemplary work in reducing the numbers of people sleeping on the streets and its commitment to eradicating homelessness. New research undertaken in the city reveals the complex and challenging life experiences that many homeless people have endured before they even lost their homes. Yet, those same individuals desire a better future for themselves and an opportunity to contribute productively to the city they live in. Local services encourage the development of skills and self-esteem, but can only succeed if there are opportunities to put this into practice. They can offer a range of ways to work with them which will be discussed on the evening.
The event will be held on Friday 25th May 2012 at the Mitchell Arts Centre, Broad Street, Hanley, ST1 4HG.
- 17:30 Wine reception
- 18:00 Presentations, Q+A, Networking
- 20:00 Close
If you would like to attend the event please contact Margeurite Castille at Brighter Futures on 01782 406000 or at Marguerite.Castille@brighter-futures.org.uk
If you have any questions about the event itself, please contact Gareth Morris on 0161 295 6926 or on g.j.morris@salford.ac.uk
Somewhere Nowhere: A Graphic Novel About Homelessness
Several months ago, we decided to produce something from our research that would engage a larger, more diverse audience than those who would normally take an interest in academic research findings. This project has given us a great opportunity to do so. Because the life stories of the people we interviewed during the course of the research were so rich, informative, and thought-provoking, we felt they were worthy of being retold to a wider audience. Our idea was to produce a graphic novel telling a small selection of the stories told to us.
We were introduced, via a colleague in the University’s Art School, to Sam Dahl. At the time, Sam was completing his postgraduate studies at the University and has been working hard at providing the artwork for the book ever since. We’ve taken five diverse stories to provide the content for the graphic novel and each depicts a different pathway that precedes an episode of homelessness. The working title of the book is ‘Somewhere Nowhere’ and refers to the displacement that people often described in their life story: they knew where they were in time and space but were unclear of their place in their life journey.
We’re pleased to share a small sample of the images from the book here. Though these are all based on the real life stories of our participants, note that the names used here are anonymised and care has been taken to remove clearly identifiable information.
The following images are taken from Scott’s story. He described experiencing a happy, normal childhood which was destroyed by an incident of sexual abuse. For Scott, this was a turning point in his life which led to many other factors often associated with the term ‘complex lives’: family rejection, rough sleeping, substance misuse, and poor physical health.
The graphic novel is scheduled for completion at the end of May where it will be available for people to take away and read at our research dissemination event in Stoke. In a future post, I will publish some more details about the book’s distribution. We’d like it to be read as far and wide as possible. We hope the book will be easy for anybody to pick up and read regardless of their knowledge of homelessness. We also hope it will enable new audiences to learn more about the complexity of people’s lives and the problems they may be addressing before and during their episodes of homelessness.
If you have any feedback, questions, or comments about Somewhere Nowhere, please leave them in the box below. We’d be really interested to hear what people have to say about it.
To learn more about Sam and his work, please check out this link and follow him on Twitter.
Do People Adapt to Homelessness? The Role of Social Networks
Last September, Phil and I went to Cambridge to give a presentation based on our findings from the homelessness research. It was a social psychology conference, so talked about the social networks of the individuals we interviewed. The slides we used are below. Note that when we talk about social networks here, we refer to friendships, not family or intimate/sexual relationships.
We can contribute more to this discussion because the life story approach we took to our research enables us to look further into the past of an individual’s life and establish the roles of different friendships over time.
While we accept that individuals life stories are all different, there were some commonalities among many of the young people in terms of how they viewed these friendships. In very basic terms, many of them made friends with the ‘wrong crowd’ during their high school years and frequently used drink and drugs and engaged in some low-level crime etc. (see quotes for these in the slides). In their post-school years, they often disengaged with these networks when they realised they wanted something more or different in their lives.
The third part of their life story where they discussed friendships was when they were in the hostel. This was often perceived as a time of renewal for many of our interviewees (more quotes in the slides). It is here where we begin to question the strength of the hypothesis above, that: “the longer young people are homeless, the more they adapt to homelessness as a way of life”. We should be very careful as researchers in making such claims: because of the experiences that people have reported to us in this research, I am doubtful of the claim this hypothesis makes and believe it to be potentially dangerous in undermining the role of hostel accommodation and the potential for friendships made there.
I will continue to work on this analysis and welcome any feedback from others…
- Do you think that people adapt to homelessness?
- Do you think that other people have a role in sustaining a person’s homelessness, or helping people out of it, or perhaps both?
Cooperation and competition in homelessness service provision
I am one of the researchers working on the project and have been involved in interviewing key services across Stoke to explore responses to homelessness from a service provider perspective. I am off to the Australasian Housing Researchers’ Conference (http://www.adelaide.edu.au/churp/ahrc12/) next week to present our findings from these interviews.
This is the abstract for my presentation:
The response to homelessness in the UK has moved away from focusing specifically on housing policy to a recognition of the complex needs of those experiencing, or at risk of, homelessness. A key characteristic has been an emphasis on multi-agency working at a local level. This paper reports on findings emerging from a two-year study into homelessness in a UK city. The project as whole explored the life histories of people experiencing homelessness as well as focusing on the context in which homelessness services were delivered in the city. To this end, a number of people working in the ‘homeless industry’ were interviewed about the issues impacting upon their work. Based upon these interviews, this paper focuses on the response of service providers towards homelessness, exploring the mobilisation of multi-agency working, and examining how service providing professionals talk about the people they work with and alongside. It highlights an increasing ‘professionalization’ of key services, a hierarchy of organizations and a conflict between cooperation and competition in multi-agency working. Overall, it illustrates that competition between services, coupled with the ‘financial crisis’, has created an environment where organizations more often work with those individuals deemed most likely to ‘succeed’. Consequently, supporting individuals with the most complex needs remained a key issue for service providers.
We would welcome comments on any of the issues raised above…
lisascullion
Gareth_Morris
