On 5th and 6th December, during Innovation Team Meeting, we had the opportunity to share our experience with SOLACE-CEE Partners from across Central and Eastern European countries. We presented our value-based take on the Housing First method based on the Polish ‘Open Model to End Homelessness’ (Polish title: “Najpierw mieszkanie – Otwarty Model Zakończenia Bezdomności”)
https://najpierwmieszkanie.org.pl/publikacje/strona/otwarty-model-rozdzial-i
The Open Model summarises the experience of HF pilots that took place in Poland in 2019-2023 and puts it in the framework of international HF recommendations. It was written by the President of the HFPF Julia Wygnańska, certificated Housing First trainer (HFEH 2022), social researcher, motivational dialogue practitioner (PIDM 2022) and social reintegration therapist (PTPOW 2019).
The Open Model follows the philosophy of systemic change put forward by Housing First Europe Hub as a “Comapass Stategy” in 2023 (Demos Helsinki):
“The HF model comes with a set of principles, a selection of which may function as the compass’ cardinal directions (…) and leave ample room for flexible implementation.”
The 6 cardinal directions – core values – of the Open Model include:
- Relationship as a safe space for support worker and the customer to express themselves and receive each others reactions; it is to model good behaviours
- Housing as a right meaning access to an apartment which is independent, private and long term without any preliminary conditions concerning health, treatment, employment or ‘readiness’.
- Decisions as the right to take one’s own decisions concerning one’s life and goals, without them being suggested or enforced by support workers, without anticipation of their appearance, making sure that they develop one’s agency e.g. person centred approach, motivational interviewing, solution based therapy, harm reduction.
- Recovery as the right to full physical, mental and social wellbeing with appreciation for each step towards better health and the fact that full health, such as abstinence from substances, is a goal rather than a means.
- Support as access to individualised, multidisciplinary and continuous support relevant to health diagnosis and goals eg. personal assistance, trauma informed care, psychiatric and mental health services, general health services.
- Community as the right to be addressed/treated as a member of the local community regardless of the kind of housing situation and the right to housing in a ‘social mix’ with full access to services available for all members of the community rather than in a special programme, isolated space or institution (deinstitutionalisation).
HFPF has followed the HF philosophy since its establishment in 2020 both in providing support to people with the experience of long term homelessness and mental health crises through The Ambivalence Program and in national and international advocacy. Since the publication of the Open Model in 2023 we have followed and promoted its guidelines including the values and the “compas” perspective.
In the SOLACE-CEE Partnership we hope to test the changing power of the values in ending homelessness through putting them to work in an integrated social and health care models. We believe that the values – even as singular ones – can be put to work in any program/service/Hub and it will improve the quality of life of people using the programs and services. It might not result in transforming services into the original Housing First Programs especially not in the CEE Region but it is not the goal. The goal is to end homelessness.
Spreading the word…
Since the beginning of the SOLACE-CEE Partnership the HFPF representatives have participated in few local, national and international events spreading the word about the Partnership. We were present at the New Horisions in Housing First Conference of HF Europe Hub in Dublin, Polish Parliamentary Commission for Homelessness, Warsaw Municipal Council for the Homeless and other forums.
Pilot – The Ambivalence Program
The Polish SOLACE-CEE HUB Pilot has already started! Program Ambivalence is addressed to 10 participants to whom it provides continuous support based on the HF values and SOLACE-CEE major goal of providing an integrated social and health care model. The support team works in the environment of the participants, composed of psychologists, therapists and HF practitioners who are available 7/24. The team meets or is ready to meet with each participant at least once a week. At its disposal, it has extra funding for providing Participants with all services they need and which are not available in the public housing social and health systems e.g. psychiatric consultations or arrays management.
We already got six participants engaged in the long term work on their goals and we are working on the full engagement with the next 4 potential participants. In the first four months of the HUB operation (October 2024-January 2025) the Ambivalence Team provided the Participants with about 500 hours of HF value based integrated support including psychological and therapeutic consultations, personal assistance and in kind and financial support of housing.
We all look further to the future.
The fitting puzzle
Our work can be introduced as a fitting puzzle in the complicated social, housing and health care system. Our part of the puzzle is to build self consciousness, motivation and agency of our Participants so that they can use it to meander through the public support systems in order to use it to meet their own goals.
As a fitting puzzle, we also provide professional psychological supervision and Housing Values Consultancy to stakeholders who run housing-based programs and want to strengthen their effectiveness in ending homelessness. We already support three such teams and look forward to supporting more during SOLACE-CEE.
How we talk...
As part of our mission we work on eliminating misconceptions regarding homelessness. We plan to research the language of talking/writing about homelessness, concentrating on how people experiencing homelessness would like to be talked about. We observe homelessness sector workers such as assistants, social workers, street workers and researchers to use more inclusive, nondiscriminatory and dignified language, but the general public does not follow through. There is no knowledge on how people with lived experience of homelessness themselves would like to be talked about. Does it really matter to them how the professionals and journalists describe the homelessness? We plan to conduct a survey in cooperation with an academic institution to learn how to communicate homelessness to be consistent with the needs and views of people who do experience homelessness. It is a part of the value of “Decisions” – person-centred approach.