Routes to a settled home

Who It's For

Leaders, commissioners and managers in homelessness, housing, health and the voluntary sector

Overview

People with long histories of homelessness need a home and services that fit together. This half day completes Every door the right door and begins with Housing First, from Sam Tsemberis and Pathways to Housing to Finland's national strategy and Homeless Link's seven principles, then psychologically informed environments. Lived experience follows, using Baljeet Sandhu's three forms of expertise and Miranda Fricker on injustice, with Recovery Colleges as a case. Housing with care and dual regulation come next, and five stakeholders across England and Wales. The closing section explores the Plymouth Alliance for Complex Needs and Changing Futures, and staff wellbeing, vicarious trauma and moral injury.

Aims

This half day is built to help leaders apply Housing First with fidelity, make exclusion the exception, move lived experience from consultation to leadership, and build partnerships with shared budgets and risk, while treating staff wellbeing as an organisational responsibility rather than a personal duty.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Assess whether a service is true to Homeless Link's seven Housing First principles, and how small changes erode fidelity.
2. 2Distinguish tokenism from genuine lived experience leadership, and plan the pay, support and power that make it sustainable.
3. 3Plan the steps to move a partnership from paper to practice, and a humane response after the death of someone your service supports.

What you'll develop

Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:

1. 1Explain how Housing First differs from the staircase model, and why it treats a home as a foundation for recovery rather than a reward.
2. 2Explain why the building, rules and relationships of a service are part of the support, using SAMHSA's six principles and the five elements of a PIE.
3. 3Distinguish lived experience, lived expertise and experts by experience, and explain why lived experience is a form of knowledge rather than only feedback.
4. 4Explain Sandhu's lived, learnt and practice expertise and use them to identify which forms are missing from your leadership team.
5. 5Distinguish general needs housing, extra care housing and supported living by purpose, population and the support built into the offer.
6. 6Identify the five key stakeholders of a housing association and describe what the association is accountable to each of them for.
7. 7Explain why partnerships without shared budgets or shared risk tend to stay as conversations, using the Plymouth Alliance and Changing Futures as examples.
8. 8Distinguish vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, burnout and moral injury, and explain why each calls for a different response.