Connecting the homeless to essential services

By Alex Giblin

As many as 1,500 homeless people gathered at Sydney Town Hall last Tuesday for the inaugural Sydney Homeless Connect.

The event, which is funded entirely through donations, was staffed by 300 volunteers and representatives from over 60 government agencies.

Services provided included housing and employment assistance, health checks, dental and eye checks, clothing and footwear, legal services and counselling.

Meals, haircuts, showers, and even massages were also offered.

“I was really down and out, I was ready to neck myself this morning,” said a 44-year-old homeless man, who asked that his name be withheld to protect his children.

“They’ve stopped a lot of deaths today, a lot of deaths, by running this.”

According to the most recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were 105,000 homeless people in Australia in 2006, with over 27,000 of them in NSW.

Homeless Connect originated in Los Angeles, California, in 2004. The program has been running in Brisbane since 2006, and ran in Perth last year.

Last week’s event was the largest in Australia so far.

The idea of Homeless Connect is to connect people to services so that they can get continuing support for the rest of the year and help them get off the street.

Ken Hamilton, 62, founder of community group Homeless Voice, who has been homeless for 10 years, said that people had come from as far as Mount Victoria, Windsor, and Penrith.

“A homeless person can come in and he can go to Housing, he can go and see Centrelink, he can go and see a doctor, he can go and see a dentist, or an optometrist. Or he might want a new pair of shoes or a decent pair of pants, and he can get all of that,” he said.

Andrew Everingham, director of the event, said it was a common misbelief that homeless people do not want to be helped. He said that one of the difficulties in getting support is the separation of services.

“In a lot of instances when someone wants help they have to go to three or four agencies to get that. Our idea is to bring all of those together in one place so that we can shortcut that and get them these services as quickly as we can.”

City of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore opened the event.

“Today we hope to provide essential services to those who need it most,” Cr Moore said. “Sleeping rough puts people at risk of abuse and exploitation and often results in the loss of stability, health, social networks and job opportunities.”

“You can’t just fix all of these problems in a day,” Mr Everingham said. “What we can do, though, is fix some of them. The idea of today for those long-term problems is that we at least get them on that bottom rung of the ladder, on the path out of homelessness.”