Homelessness will not end through compassion alone

In his first speech as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham committed to ending long-term rough sleeping across the UK

He also promised to build a more “preventative state” that tackles the root causes of why people do not have a stable home. This is a welcome commitment. For too long, our response to homelessness has begun only when someone is in crisis.

 If we are serious about ending it, we must act earlier and prevent people from losing their homes in the first place.

But who is responsible for doing that? Homelessness is rarely caused by a single event.By the time somebody loses their home, they may have experienced debt, a relationship breakdown, poor health, trauma or isolation. Often, several opportunities to help will have been missed along the way.

Prevention therefore cannot be left to one government department alone or a small, specialist homelessness sector. It requires action across health, welfare, education, employment, housing and justice. It also depends on institutions and communities beyond the state, including the faith sector.

Churches and other faith communities already do a great deal for people experiencing homelessness. Every day, volunteers give their time and energy to people facing hardship. They run food banks, hostels, night shelters and outreach services, ensuring that people do not go hungry or face the winter without somewhere warm to sleep.

This work matters enormously, but faith communities must ask themselves what they could do earlier, before a person is in crisis. Their distinctive position in society makes them well placed to do so.  Rooted in the places they serve,  faith  communities bring together people who might otherwise never meet. They hold relationships of trust built over years, sometimes generations.

People often turn to a priest, pastor, imam, rabbi or fellow member of a congregation during moments of difficulty. As a result, faith communities may pick up important signs that someone is at risk of homelessness. Financial strain, family problems or growing isolation – all risk factors of homelessness –  may come up in conversations.

Faith communities may not always have the expertise or resources to resolve the problems somebody is facing, but their local knowledge and networks can help connect people with practical and specialist support, providing the circuit breaker they need.

This approach – listening carefully, recognising need and acting on what we learn – reflects the Vincentian values at the heart of our work at Depaul, the international group of charities I represent.

Depaul takes its name and inspiration from St Vincent de Paul, the 17th-century Catholic priest and reformer who devoted his life to serving people who were poor, sick or without a home. His belief in the worth of every person, and his insistence on practical action, still run through everything we do.

I see this across our missions around the world.  Take our response in the days immediately following  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the number of people Depaul supported each day rose from 8,500 to 35,000 within weeks. This was only possible because we were able to open a logistics hub at our sister charity in  Slovakia and quickly establish a cross border route to deliver aid. In achieving this we drew extensively on United Nations data and worked closely with CAFOD and other  global Caritas members with local knowledge.

The data helped us understand the scale of the crisis and how people were moving. Caritas’s local presence – its priests, parishes and volunteers already embedded in affected communities – provided knowledge no agency report could offer on its own. They could tell us not only how many people were moving, but who they were, where they were going and what they needed.

The same principle shaped our work in Slovakia after the fall of communism, when people were visibly sleeping rough but nobody knew the true scale of the problem. Working with the University of Bratislava, we carried out the country’s first comprehensive street assessment and estimated that 50,000 people were sleeping rough across the country.

That evidence helped persuade the government to give us a disused warehouse, which we repaired, kitted out with industrial fans and filled  with army cots. Within two weeks, more than 250 people were seeking shelter there each night. Twenty-six people had died from hypothermia in Bratislava the previous winter. That year, we made sure nobody did.

Both these examples offer an important lesson: moral conviction, when combined with evidence  and local insight, is a powerful force for change.

The question for every faith community is therefore not only how it responds when somebody becomes homeless, but what it could have done before they reached that point. Compassion will always be essential, but if we want to end homelessness, it must move us to act before a crisis begins.

Mark McGreevy is President of the Depaul Group and Founder of the Institute of Global Homelessness at DePaul University. This article draws on his chapter in How to Use Evidence to End Homelessness, a collection of essays  commissioned by the Centre for Homelessness Impact and published by Bristol University Press on 27 August.