On 7th December 2017, I aligned with parties from across Manchester to host the UK’s first ‘Housing Ideas Exchange’ event at Manchester Metropolitan University: A networking, empowerment, ideas and action forum about pro-actively tackling housing issues. Welcoming over 200 participants, including keynote speaker Daniel McDonald, of Homeless Innovations, Tampa Police, Florida, we created a platform to spark essential dialogue amongst a diverse and passionate audience.
Contributors aligned from the public, private, third and academic sectors, with sessions hosted on subjects including social policy and activism, criminality and complex needs, architecture and design, health and well-being and international innovation. The event was enhanced by an interactive performance, documentary screening and talk by members of Manchester’s homeless and rough sleeping community, as well as an ideas fayre, topical debates and networking opportunities.
We will now take this collaborative working ethos to the next level; touring roadshows, seminars and workshops in order to develop a professional international knowledge exchange programme of pro-active and innovative response towards housing and homelessness issues. Strengthening relationships created during this Fellowship and developing new partnerships, collaborations and associations, our members network will allow free-sharing of ground-breaking research, innovation, fieldwork, successful practice and alternative strategic and procedural guidelines, across a global platform.
Our preliminary 12-month pilot project will see this network established in both the UK and the USA: Initially, via a small number of on-the-ground respondents who will be trained, mentored, coached and empowered whilst they are considering trialling, testing, implementing and/or operating a ‘Social Property Investment’ led address towards homelessness in their region. This initial test-period will allow us to nurture practitioners, whilst further identifying new solutions to homelessness - as well as barriers to recovery - person-by-person, albeit, on a much wider scale.
The ‘Social Property Investment’ working consortium will extend an open invitation for membership; aiming to contain representation from membership bodies, local authorities, housing associations, charitable organisations, social enterprises, private sector providers, social investors and innovators, the voluntary sector, activist groups, passionate young people and those with lived and/or current experience of homelessness. We will pro-actively engage corporate partners and demonstrate significant, measurable value in Corporate Social Responsibility.
This network will expand each year as the project evolves, with participants encouraged to support each other, work together, grow together - and to each become valuable assets in the solutions they collectively create.
Copyright © by Amy.F.Varle, January 2018.
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The views and opinions expressed in this report and its content are those of the author and not of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, which has no responsibility or liability for any part of the report.
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