When Halima’s* parents moved back to Somalia she was 19, and thought: “God forbid, I’m not going there. I’m living my best life.” The reality of living unmoored was not so positive.
Within months, she had joined the ranks of the hidden homeless, couch surfing with friends. With a roof over her head, albeit barely, the London borough she had lived in for 20 years didn’t consider her vulnerable enough for social housing, yet her lack of fixed address meant she couldn’t sign on to universal credit.
“It’s so easy to lose yourself as a person at that point,” she said. “I feel like the government, the councils have failed young people especially – there’s no support for us, it’s so hard to rent a place.”
A homeless youth centre helped her secure a hotel job, but Halima had always dreamed of working in TV, and despite all the odds she secured a BBC internship, which she planned to do on top of night shifts.
When the pandemic hit, her internship moved online, a problem for Halima since she had no laptop.
That’s when she was referred to the charity Greater Change, which immediately gave her money to buy one. When she landed her first TV production contract in Bristol, Greater Change swiftly funded the deposit and her first month’s rent. Thanks to that helping hand, she’s now “sailing through the industry”.
Greater Change takes an unusually personalised approach: it crowdfunds donations for someone’s specific needs, whether it is rent deposits, mental health treatment, skills courses and equipment – anything which can help people break out of the cycle of homelessness.
Donors are then kept up to date with people’s personal journeys, challenging the misconception that homeless people will just spend handouts on drugs. If the person needs something extra, the donor can be approached, or they are given the opportunity to contribute to a wider pot for all of the charity’s clients.
“It was so quick,” said Halima of her experience with the charity. “Sometimes it can take three months to get help, you have to provide statements and so on, but with Greater Change you explain the situation, and it’s a simple yes or no.”
The approach is flexible, says the charity’s chief executive, Jonathan Tan, which is the secret to Greater Change’s success, and the reason why its new impact report has found that 86% of the more than 200 people it has helped were in stable housing a year later.
He contrasts Halima’s experience with the discretionary housing payments available to councils – he suspects that had she applied for one of these, she would have been pressured to find cheaper housing, and it might have resulted in her losing the foot-in-the-door contract that has led to sustainable employment.
“If you try to cut corners it doesn’t really work. If we invest now to solve the problem we can eventually spend less money managing it in the long run,” he said.
Among the charity’s clients is Joe, who needed £500 so he could buy tools to start working as a carpenter after leaving prison; Valentine, who needed £1,000 in help with rent arrears while she looked for a job after a relationship breakdown; and Amir, who needed £400 in help with training fees and ID so he could work in construction.
Nearly half of those helped make it into sustained employment, while most report improvements to their motivation, self-care, mental health and social networks. Ex-offenders supported by the grants had reoffending rates seven times lower than the national average.
Tan said the approach was most effective for the “hidden homeless”, who far outnumber people who sleep on the streets. He thinks people unhelpfully think of homeless/not-homeless as a binary, when in fact there are “stages where you’re facing worse and worse inequality and poverty”. With the cost of living crisis, the charity is increasingly supporting people who would otherwise be living stable lives.
Greater Change’s impact report for 2023 estimates it costs about £1,300 on average to change a person’s life, but that this generates savings averaging £35,000 for each person annually, which could be spent on temporary accommodation, healthcare and the criminal justice system, representing a £27 benefit for £1 donated. Greater Change calculated that it saved £7.4m in public money in 2023.
The charity hopes to help another 1,000 people in the next two years, and to scale up to 40,000 by 2033.
Tan said the real dream was to spark deeper change: “The ambition is to be redundant, we want public policy to incorporate something like these very flexible grants into the system. They would be deployed by frontline support workers, they can use their own discretion to get things done, without having to clear lines and lines of chains of command.”
*name has been changed
