In conversation with… Amanda Dubarry,
CEO, Your Place

If homelessness is as much about health as it is about housing, why isn’t the government doing more?

A few years on from our transformative rebrand of award-winning homelessness charity Your Place, Our Nick asks its inspirational leader Amanda Dubarry what’s progressing for the organisation and the wider sector — and what still needs to be addressed. 

How has resetting the identity of your organisation — from the old-world Caritas Anchor House to the more progressive Your Place — supported your purpose, focus and fundraising?

The new identity has provided a great platform for us to tell the real story of who we are and why people should connect with us. I was reminded of this when looking at the brand guidelines recently. It talks about using real images — as in, not always showing happy, smiling faces. It’s so important to tell a truthful human story about homelessness. 

One of the big concerns about losing our catholic heritage name was that we’d lose donors. That’s absolutely not been the case — and our catholic network understands the need for a new identity and they’ve continued to support us.

There’s more that we need to do and, with a new head of fundraising and comms and more team members coming in this year, we can start to harness what we have and build more supporter networks. It’s an essential and exciting part of our progress to look forward to.

You mentioned the importance of authentic storytelling. How is telling a realistic story about homelessness beneficial for Your Place and its residents? 

A lot of people have a certain vision of homelessness and its causes, and of the people who find themselves without a home. The reality is much more complex, which is why a person-centred approach is really the only way we can help people solve homelessness, and that’s what our identity speaks to. 

We can say the same about perceptions of what charities do. There’s still an old-school notion that charities are there to provide a crutch, and to do to people rather than work with them.  

We needed an identity to reflect our values and support our case-making, while also being strategic and helping us achieve our ambitions for long-term change. 

I’d like to see a lot more joined-up thinking at policy level. In local authorities, homelessness sits within housing, and actually it could sit within health or social care. Housing is just one symptom of what’s going on for people.

Having campaigned for the decriminalisation of rough sleeping, you must be delighted with the government’s decision? How might this help toward solving homelessness and what new ideas or potential solutions are you seeing emerge? 

It was an important campaign and we supported it wholeheartedly. While there have been very few actual arrests, what the law symbolises rather than exerts is potentially more damaging — in terms of prescribing how we should be perceiving the issues people have and how we should be working to solve them. There’s still a lot of public judgement of the worthy vs unworthy and the common challenge ‘Why don’t you just get a job?’ without recognising the roots of the problem, such as poverty and health causes.  

Levels of rough sleeping have been creeping back up right across the country, particularly in London, since the end of the ‘everyone in’ initiative, which during the pandemic meant that every person sleeping rough could find a roof over their heads. So, my biggest concern right now is how will this change in legislation be followed up? What will replace this law?

Earlier in the year the government announced a significant financial package to address homelessness. What does that mean in real terms for Your Place, and what broader fundraising challenges are you facing?

This package is sadly not new funding. We’re part of Homeless Link, a membership body for homelessness organisations, who did a big piece of research and estimated that there was about a billion pounds worth of funding that was about to come to an end. What was announced is a billion pounds worth of funding without any inflationary increase. So, there’s actually less money coming into our sector in real terms.

The good news, however, is that the package funds all of the rough sleeping services in the UK, and essentially that funding has been renewed for another year. But we’ve yet to hear what they’re going to do in the longer-term, so there’s still no guarantee for services like ours that we’re actually going to get all the money we need. That means we could actually be short on funding for essential services quite soon.

Since the pandemic, fundraising has become more and more challenging. Across the sector we have already stripped out every bit of unnecessary cost, so what we’re delivering is what we absolutely have to deliver. And if you’ve got an increase of 10 per cent cost, where do you find that? 

The recent increases in National Insurance and London living wage increases have affected us quite heavily too. So, we’re having challenging conversations about budgets as we always do.

Your approach is all about responding to people’s needs — solving homelessness one person at a time. How is that policy impacted by financial and logistical challenges? 

We see ourselves as being there for the community, and to help people who are experiencing homelessness and poverty. We don’t have a rigid set of restrictions around that, which means we’re always flexing and adapting. We listen to what people need and think about whether we can respond and meet those needs, and how we do that. For example, we’ve recommissioned 25 of our beds to respond to immediate specific needs in our community. 

The local authority doesn’t commission as many beds in our service as they used to. But that in itself actually gives us a bit more flexibility to work with direct referrals and to work with other commissioners. 

So, our approach is a  kind of a mix of having a clear vision and some clear strategic aims and then having the flexibility and the agility to move into new spaces that meet that vision. We also need to be mindful of the danger of being too opportunistic and being solely led by the funding. And there’s the opposite risk of being too rigid and saying no. It’s a fine balance.

We’ve recently been focusing on some new accommodation called the Harbour Project – twenty-three flats dedicated to supporting people from across London who have been rough sleeping and using homelessness services for a long time. It’s unique in its scope, and will be London’s first long-term accommodation project for people experiencing homelessness. We’ve been really lucky to get a donation that allowed us to purchase a property, and so we’re busy working on getting that up and running. We’re really proud of the space.

What new needs are you seeing emerge in east London?

We have a lot of people seeking asylum, coming through the home office, which brings a few challenges such as different languages and cultural needs coming together. At the same time, a high proportion of these residents are really motivated to move into work and support themselves and their families financially because that’s part of their immigration dream. 

So, we have more working residents and a very active employability programme — which is keeping our job coach really busy. The programme is actually benefitting most of our residents and playing a big part in getting them back on their feet.

Public spending on temporary hotel accommodation for asylum seekers often hits the news headlines. Do you think Your Place’s approach is part of a longer-term, and more cost-effective solution?

Our funding comes from a different part of the government budget, so I’m not entirely sure on cost comparisons. But what I can say is that we’re helping people to move on in their lives, so there has to be a cost benefit to society.

Earlier you reflected on public attitudes still being problematic at times. How does the local community feel about the work that you do? 

For the 30 years I’ve been in the sector, public attitudes towards homelessness — generally speaking — have actually been quite supportive. But there’s still this concept of the individuals supported needing to be polite and show gratitude, and when you get people who have difficult behaviour, there’s a perception that they are sort of unworthy and shouldn’t be helped. 

I understand this because people only have so much mental capacity to sit and think about things that aren’t in their daily spectrum of activities.  

I think a large proportion of the public still don’t realise that some people have had an awful time and they’re experiencing trauma. Sometimes they withdraw into themselves and they’re not very communicative, sometimes they become actively quite spiky as a way of preventing themselves from connecting with people, and being let down again. They could actually be quite unwell too.

How might empathy grow and perceptions change? 

This connects back to what I was saying about telling the real story about the people we support — how they find themselves without a home, how they become unwell and how it’s sometimes difficult for them to come across happy and grateful.

We all connect with our hearts, so it’s important to show human stories. Sometimes it’s okay to say this person is still unwell, but with our support they are making progress.

What I’d like is for people to become a little bit more aware of what can lead to homelessness, and also of the huge link between health issues and homelessness.

Making the connection between health and homelessness is a big part of how Your Place supports people. What action could be taken on a national level to address this? 

We have residents who are in their 40s that you and I would probably mistake for being nearer to 80. They’re so frail from years of rough sleeping and not being equipped to look after themselves.

For so many people whose mental health is in a bad place as a result of the experiences they’ve endured, their physical health is really very poor. I think we associate homelessness with housing and, of course, that makes sense. But actually more often than not there’s a health issue at the root of it. 

I’d like to see a lot more joined-up thinking at policy level. For example, government departments where homelessness sits within the housing director of local authorities, and actually it could sit within health or it could sit within social care. People are people, really. Housing is just one symptom of what’s going on for them. 

You’ve often talked about the importance of collaboration within the wider charity sector too. What’s your message to others in your sector and more broadly? 

Collaboration is really important and I think I’m long enough in the tooth, and have enough grey hair to remember what it was like before everything was being commissioned to within an inch of its life. There was more sharing then, whereas now we’re all effectively set up to compete against one another. 

We’re all tendering for the same contracts with commercially sensitive information, so it makes it difficult to be as open as we used to be. At the same time, I think we worry too much about some of these things and need to remember it’s not just about the numbers. We need to reconnect and stay aligned with our purpose.