Galvanise Brighton & Hove is a community-led campaign with local people working together to end street homelessness.
The campaign sits alongside the vision of the City’s Rough Sleepers Strategy which aims to make sure that no-one has the need to sleep rough in Brighton & Hove by 2020.
Galvanise BH is part of the European Campaign to End Street Homelessness. The campaign, coordinated by World Habitat, is currently operating in 10 European cities. A project which has seen 1,000 volunteers survey rough sleepers in cities across Europe, from Valencia to London.
The campaign is supported by YMCA DownsLink Group, Brighton YMCA, St. Mungo’s, The Passage, Fulfilling Lives, Brighton and Hove City Council and a variety of community organisations and local businesses.
The campaign in Brighton is led by YMCA Brighton and YCMA Downslink with support from several agencies including Brighton and Hove Council, and St. Mungo’s.
In Brighton, more than 1,000 people sleep on the streets every year. The local vision of Galvanise Brighton & Hove is to work together to make sure no-one experiences street homelessness in Brighton and Hove by 2020.
Brighton hopes to expand their Housing First provision through the campaign building on the city’s 2014 Housing First pilot.
Volunteers went out in the streets in November to meet homeless people as part of Brighton’s Connections Week.
Galvanise Brihgton & Hove’s next steps involved inviting local stakeholders to a Community De-brief on the 5 December at the i360 on the seafront where they presented the research findings and outline the key recommendations.
This started some conversations about how the key recommendations might be implemented, and how to create space for innovation. The space hopes to connect people and help them come up with some new ideas about how to end rough sleeping.
After the Community de-brief, work began on establishing a range of forums and settings in which conversations about possible innovative solutions could continue. It is hoped that this will invite discussion about generating income to fund solutions.
In the short term, Galvanise Brighton & Hove aims to improve local support services for homeless people by making the system more helpful and more straightforward to navigate and to enable us to better target resources where they are most needed and when they are most needed.
The longer term aim is to ensure that homeless people are housed in permanent, safe, appropriate and affordable housing with the right sort of support in order to sustain it.
“We appreciate that this aim is very ambitious and this campaign sits alongside the City’s Rough Sleepers Strategy which aims for no one to need to sleep rough by 2020.”
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