Alabaré – Reducing Veterans Homelessness
Alabaré were awarded £1,380,214 under the Reducing Veterans Homelessness programme in June 2023 for their project Homes for Veterans. This project provides supported accommodation, across southwest England and Wales, dedicated to Veterans with medium to high support needs in a responsive and safe environment. The support provided by Alabaré enables Veterans to make life changes, overcome the immediate crisis of homelessness, and take increased responsibility for their future.
Homes for Veterans provide ex-Armed Forces personnel with a stable home in a community of comradeship, where they co-produce personalised support pathways, helping them achieve independence. Each home holds monthly resident meetings to discuss events within the home and a Veterans’ Forum ensures the Veterans’ voice is included. Alabaré supports Veterans through a bespoke package of advice, mentoring and a befriending, focusing on stabilising sometimes complex lives, with the aim to provide emotional and physical stability.
This programme will transition 300 Veterans to move from the streets and rough sleeping into housing where they live and work together in community, undertake communal chores and prepare and eat a meal together at least once a month, helping prevent isolation and building social skills. The key is in providing successful transitioning from their Military experiences into ‘Civvie Street’.
The homes provide on-site staff during the working week, with telephone or on-site support from an on-call manager throughout evenings and weekends, who can undertake crisis intervention. Each Veteran receives a key support worker, immediately they enter the home, who provides a person-centred approach to individual needs assessment. Veterans complete Tenancy Support plans so they leave with the knowledge and skills to successfully maintain tenancy when transitioned to independent living or lower support. When the Veteran is ready, staff identify the most suitable secure, long-term accommodation, including local authority housing, social housing, or private rents.
Key to the success of Alabaré continues to be the person-centred approach creating a safe and trusted environment where they can address the barriers each Veteran faces to living a fulfilled life. Through this grant, Veterans supported by Alabaré are given the opportunity to address these issues, make positive choices and gain the skills and tools to live a fulfilled life.
“This funding is vital to enable Veterans to move from a place of homelessness and without hope, to somewhere they feel safe and valued” explains Kirsty Scullion, Partnership and Income Generation Manager at Alabaré.
“The need is huge, having received 316 referrals to date, Alabaré has been able to house 69, 57 of whom came straight from rough sleeping, giving them a hope, a place where they can call home for now and begin to work with specialist staff to address the challenges they face. During the first 8 months of the Operation Fortitude funding Alabaré has positively moved 43 people into their own accommodation or reconciled them with estranged family members, each with resilience, tools to manage mental health and feel stable and able to move into employment. More needs to be done; ongoing stability of funding to be able to make the future of provision sustainable in the long term, creation of more bedspaces specifically for those who are facing complex challenging circumstances and high need, as well as long term ‘forever’ affordable housing. This is the first and exciting step towards ending homelessness in our Veteran population”.