Article

Change

Community

Development

11 October 2023

6 min read

Tackling homelessness needs much more than promises and policies

While homelessness generates statistics and strategies around the world, Jane Cacouris asks what really is home.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

A mother sits with a toddler standing in front of her. The father appears from the side lying on his back reaching an arm out.

A family play in a Rio favela.

“Mummy, are we homeless?” asked our six-year-old as we pulled away in the taxi. We had just eaten a final meal - a KFC family bucket of fried chicken - sitting on a sarong on the floor of our empty apartment in Rio de Janeiro, our home for almost four years.

The question left me momentarily winded. Homeless. A word that instantly conjured up feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, of sands shifting under our feet. Technically, yes, we were. My husband had just left his job in Brazil, and we had two months with nowhere to live before we relocated back to the UK. With no permanent base anywhere in the world, we were about to use the time to travel in South America as a family. Whilst I did feel somewhat insecure, my husband in contrast found it freeing; the first time in his life that he didn’t carry a set of house keys in his pocket. We had nowhere to live, but we were free to go wherever we wanted. And this is where the analogy of us actually being homeless broke down. We had a freedom of choice in a way that the vast majority of people who experience homelessness do not.

World Homeless Day on the 10th October was marked with the recent release of a landmark UN report on global homelessness. The UN define homelessness as:

“where a person or household lacks habitable space with security of tenure, rights, and ability to enjoy social relations, including safety. [It] is a manifestation of extreme poverty and a failure of multiple systems and human rights.”

According to UN-Habitat, a staggering 1.6 billion people in the world are estimated to be in inadequate housing and over 150 million have no housing at all.

Global homelessness has been rising for the past decade, with temporary homelessness being increasingly caused by conflict and climate-induced displacement. However, according to the UN report, Covid-19 exacerbated the issue, deepening existing inequalities and causing already marginalised people to be even more vulnerable.

In developing countries, the informal economy – self-made microentrepreneurs who sell everything from popcorn to shoe polishing - usually sustains the poor urban majority. But with many informal jobs vanishing during lockdowns, and with few assets and limited social safety nets, many urban dwellers were rapidly plunged further into poverty. Women and children suffering from domestic and gender-based violence had to remain in unsafe environments, with abuse escalating during lockdowns and curfews. Issues that encouraged migration and homelessness.

There are approximately 150 million children living and working on the streets worldwide. Almost impossible to imagine, and so the number sometimes doesn’t compute with our hearts.

The extent of homelessness worldwide is notoriously difficult to quantify accurately, partly due to what is known as hidden homelessness. The hidden and isolated nature of children and adolescents living on the street, for example, makes statistics difficult to gather. A 2023 UNICEF report of street children in Dhaka estimated that the number of children living on the street just in Bangladesh could be in the millions. And according to UN sources there are approximately 150 million children living and working on the streets worldwide. Almost impossible to imagine, and so the number sometimes doesn’t compute with our hearts. The true horror of the isolation of child homelessness only truly hit me a few years ago…

The residents in our block had finally had enough of the noise and called the police. They arrived in the middle of the night with their guns and shot at the children who dispersed.

Living at the top of a high-rise block in the middle of an urban neighbourhood in Rio, we were kept awake for a number of nights in a row. It started as a disturbance – children yelling in the street outside that would continue from the early hours until dawn. But as the days went on, the disturbance at night became more acute. One morning as I stepped out of our apartment in the morning, bleary-eyed and irritated, I was confronted by a small group of sleeping children lying huddled together in a row on the pavement next to a tree. Several pairs of bare filthy feet were sticking out of a blanket they were sharing. I looked down at them as I passed – they varied in age from about eight to twelve years old. The youngest was probably younger than my son at the time. He had knotted black curly hair and a streaked face. The next night we heard gun shots and then an eery silence. Another sleepless night, this time from worrying about the children, and then we discovered that the residents in our block had finally had enough of the noise and called the police. They arrived in the middle of the night with their guns and shot at the children who dispersed. The children never came back.

The government pledge to end rough sleeping in England by the end of 2024 is woefully off track.

Although homelessness is an overwhelmingly larger problem in poor countries, it also affects affluent nations, including the United Kingdom. This year the Kerslake Commission, an expert panel set up to scrutinise how rough sleeping is being addressed across England, pointed out that data on rough sleeping in London last year showed a 16 per cent increase in numbers of people sleeping rough. And that almost half (48 per cent) were sleeping rough for the first time. It concluded that the government pledge to end rough sleeping in England by the end of 2024 is woefully off track. According to Crisis, the homelessness system in England is at breaking point and the Homelessness Monitor 2023 reported that the cost-of-living crisis, rising rents and a lack of affordable housing are making it harder for councils to provide homeless people with effective support.

It is about where you feel valued and understood… where you feel loved… and where you want to come back to.

So, the problem of homelessness really is global. And what is the answer? Yes, governments must act; social safety nets and public policies to help alleviate poverty are critical. But even the richest countries with the most advanced governments have never been able to fully tackle this issue. Homelessness and poverty were rife in Biblical times. As Jesus said in the Gospel of John, “‘You will always have the poor with you”. And Jesus himself understands homelessness in a way many of us don’t; he started life in a stable, born to parents who were sleeping rough. He became a baby on the run to flee King Herod, homeless and seeking asylum in Egypt. When Jesus was older, after he was baptised by John the Baptist, he became homeless again, living life on the the road and in the open. In Luke, he says: “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

He emphasised that his followers leave the trappings of “home” to follow him.

I used to volunteer at a Christian charity, Casa de Maria e Marta, in a favela (slum) community in Rio, known for gang violence and drug trafficking. A larger-than-life Brazilian lady, Edimea, has run the charity for over twenty years. Almost a hundred children come to the charity each day, which provides three meals as well as extra tuition and care for the children. All of those who attend are either living in inadequate housing or are homeless. One day I asked Edimea whether she still sees the children after they leave her charity at age twelve. She laughed and said yes of course, they still come back to eat! And then she said,

“I do an assessment before I take a new child in, to understand what they know, and work out how we can best help them. And I always say to them – we take beautiful children, and so we are taking you, because you are beautiful inside and out. They come back because they don’t forget those words.”

Like Jesus, Edimea shows endless concern and love for those on the margins. She can’t solve all the practical problems she comes across or offer a permanent roof over a head, but she does provide a place where everyone feels a sense of safety and belonging. Perhaps home means more than the UN’s definition. It is about where you feel valued and understood… where you feel loved… and where you want to come back to.

Interview

Change

Community

Faith

S&U interviews

2 October 2023

6 min read

Cost of living crisis: faith and food banks combine to tackle destitution and its causes

The Trussell Trust wants food banks in its network to reduce the need for their services. Robert Wright finds out why the trust regrets they still distribute so much food.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man stands in front of a food bank's shelves of cereals and boxes labelled by foot type.

Howard Wardle at Eastbourne's food bank.

When Howard Wardle was making plans to set up a food bank in Eastbourne, in East Sussex, he received little support from his fellow church leaders. Speaking in the industrial estate warehouse that has been the food bank’s headquarters since 2017, Wardle recalls how at a meeting called to discuss the idea he largely encountered bafflement. At the time, Wardle was pastor of the town’s Community Church.

“They said, ‘There isn’t a need in the town – you’re wasting your time doing it’,” Wardle says of the meeting in 2011.

Wardle nevertheless received encouragement from Eastbourne’s Citizens’ Advice Bureau, from the major of the local Salvation Army congregation, the local authority’s social services – and the Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest organiser of food banks. The food bank, of which Wardle is now chief executive, last year handed out 280,000 meals.

Yet for Wardle and the Emma Revie, the Trussell Trust’s national chief executive, it is a matter of regret that its members are distributing so much food – organisations affiliated with the Trussell Trust handed out 2.99mn parcels in the year to March 2023. The figure was a 37 per cent increase on the year before, a rise largely down to the cost of living crisis started by the spikes in energy and food prices following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“It’s incredibly worrying and upsetting that so many people – more people – are having to come to food banks,” Revie says.

Workers at the Eastbourne Foodbank and others nationally are following a strategy of campaigning for policies that seek to ensure no one needs to seek emergency food support. They also employ staff who help clients to navigate the benefits system, prepare for work or take other steps to find a permanent solution to their problems.

“We were absolutely resolute that enough is enough. We needed to do whatever we needed to do to reduce the number of people needing to come to food banks.”

Emma Revie

The Trussell Trust centrally provides organisational support for affiliated food banks but deliberately does not undertake functions such as purchasing food.

Revie says it adopted the strategy of trying to put itself out of business five years ago, after experiencing significant growth in demand for its services. The trust was founded in 1997 in Salisbury by Carol and Paddy Henderson, a Christian couple. Christian principles have been core to the trust’s operations ever since.

“We reached a decision point where we either had to accept that this situation was likely to increase and would always be needed or we had to decide that that was not acceptable and change the way we thought about our work,” Revie says.

The trust recognised how inadequate food parcels were to the fundamental needs that member food banks were seeing among clients, she adds.

“The reason people are coming to food banks is they don’t have enough money to afford the essentials,” Revie says. “They know it’s not going to put credit on the gas meter. They know it’s not going to pay for school shoes.”

The organisation had to decide whether it accepted as inevitable that so many people needed its services or would reorient itself towards working to end that need, she adds.

“We were absolutely resolute that enough is enough,” Revie says. “We needed to do whatever we needed to do to reduce the number of people needing to come to food banks.”

“We’re not just here to get people on benefits. If we think they can work, we try to encourage people to get into work.”

Robert Crockford

In Eastbourne, the strategy of reducing dependence on food banks has been in place from the start, according to Wardle.

“When we started, we felt it was one thing to have a food bank giving out food but another to have people not need to come to food banks,” he says.

After receiving some grant funding, the food bank took on staff to help clients to resolve their financial problems and ensure they were receiving all the welfare benefits to which they were entitled.

“We built a welfare benefits team, a debt team and a medical benefits team so that we could help clients,” Wardle says.

Robert Crockford, the food bank’s senior advocacy officer, says he helps food bank clients to navigate issues such as the two-child limit and the overall benefits cap that restrict the amount benefits recipients can receive.

The two-child limit stops parents from receiving child benefit for any more than two children if the additional children were born after 2017. The benefit cap - £283.71 for a single person living outside Greater London – was introduced in 2013. It limits the total amount a person or family can receive from the system.

Crockford explains that he seeks to help clients to explore whether they count as disabled, a carer or have some other status that might enable them to receive higher benefits.

The group also works with People Matter, a charity that helps to prepare people for work.

“We’re not just here to get people on benefits,” Crockford says. “If we think they can work, we try to encourage people to get into work.”

Revie bemoans the overall inadequacy of the benefits system, pointing out that many recipients of Universal Credit – the main income-support benefit for most people who are unemployed or on low incomes in the UK – cannot afford food.

“When almost half the people on that benefit are unable to afford food, something systematically is failing,” she says. “So do you tackle the symptoms or do you tackle the actual problem?”

That emphasis on tackling problems is clear at another food bank affiliated with the trust – in Kingston, on the south-western edge of London.

Ian Jacobs, director of Kingston Foodbank, says his organisation works closely with Citizens’ Advice to try to develop permanent solutions for people seeking help.

“We do deep-dive investigations into people’s circumstances to try to see if we can get more money into people’s pockets,” he says.

Kingston Foodbank currently operates six foodbank centres and one pantry, where referred clients can select and buy reduced-price food. Jacobs says he would like one day to reverse the proportion, so that it operates six pantries and one food bank.

Jacobs, a member of the Doxa Deo Community Church, an independent evangelical church, also makes it clear that many volunteers are working at the food bank out of Christian conviction.

“We’re always open to pray with clients,” he says.

Revie says the trust is “deeply rooted” in the local churches.

“Many of our volunteers and staff are motivated in the work that they do by their Christian faith,” she says. “Our values of community, compassion, dignity and justice are deeply rooted in the Christian faith.”

Revie points out that the trust was founded by Christians and that its network grew through approaches by individual churches to the trust.
"We as an organisation work with people of all faiths and none and we certainly support people of all faiths and none," she says. "But we are deeply rooted in the local churches and many of our volunteers and staff are motivated in the work that they do by their Christian faith,” she says.
Faith has a "very special role to play" in the trust's work, Revie adds.
“Our values of community, compassion, dignity and justice are deeply rooted in the Christian faith," she says.

“We don’t believe there should be food banks in today’s society,” Jacobs says. “That’s why we do all the extra work to make sure people aren’t dependent on the food bank.”