Nepean Campaign Against Homelessness

Hi everyone
Just a quick note to let you know the website is back! We are all technology challenged in the NCAH team and so it has taken us almost six months to work out what to do. After all that it only took ten minutes! We will be updating and enhancing the website over the next couple of weeks

What do you do when you've lost your job, lost your home and you have three kids to feed? You end up in a motel cooking, eating and sleeping in one room at the taxpayer's expense. These are Australia's new homeless.

In a gritty and at times confronting documentary, reporter Sarah Ferguson goes inside the lives of these people. They once had jobs and homes, now hit by the triple whammy of the global financial crisis, a rental market that's almost non-existent and government neglect of public housing, their situation is bleak.

"I've always had this picture in my head of a homeless person... they've got torn dirty clothes, they're not shaven, they're sort of sitting out on the corner looking for a handout… I'm not in that category but I don't have a home for my family and it's really embarrassing." David    Read More 

As we near the launch of the Regional Task Force by Minister Plibersek on Sept 30th local Councils have endorsed their involvement. You can download 2 of these reports by clicking on the following:

Penrith Council report

Blue Mountains Council report

Nan Roman Forum, 7 Sept: 'Building the public & political will' to end homelessness


Monday 7th Sept. Nan Roman, CEO of the US peak homelessness body the National Alliance to End Homelesness (NAEH)  was Keynote Speaker at a forum on Regional Plans to End Homelessness, hosted by the City of Sydney and the Nepean Campaign Against Homelessness, in the city.

Nan Roman and the NAEH have helped faciliate almost 400 10-year plans to end homelessness in the US, and are at the forefront of the movement to end homelessness through the transformation of the homelessness and mainstream service systems. Nan spoke on the importance of getting reliable homelessness data to ensure that clear goals can be set by which the success of new programs can be judged. Targets are important, she said to enable the setting of aspirational goals which can be segmented , thus becoming more do-able. If clear targets are set then the ensuing interventions can be examined to see what worked.

She outlined how in the US they had initially found that around 80% of people became homeless because of an economic issue, whilst around 20% were experiencing homelessness repeatedly and required more intensive support. They therefore devised strategies to reallocate resources so that the goal wasn't just to provide services to everyone who became homeless, but to aim to solve the problem of homelessness - that is, stop them becoming homeless in the first place.

Nan also described the process the Alliance had undertaken in building the public and political will to end homelessness, and the changes that had ensued within the mainstream and the homelessness service systems. For more information on 10 Year Plans to End Homelessness visit www.endhomelessness.org

The Nepean Campaign Against Homelessness is pleased to announce the launch of the Regional Task Force on Homelessness by the Hon. Minister for Housing Tanya Plibersek, on September 30th at Penrith Council. The primary objective of the Regional Task Force is to faciliate the development of a 10 year plan to end homelessness. The Task Force will be chaired by Felicity Reynolds, CEO of the Mercy Foundation.

Regional Planning to end homelessness: forum in brief

Other speakers at the Forum included Kate Gumley, Manager - Homelesness Branch of FAHCSIA, and John McMillan, Director - Homelessness Unit, Housing NSW who spoke on the Commonwealth and State governments policy and funding commitments in relation to developing a new response to homelessness. Liz Giles, Manager of the Homeless Unit, City of Sydney and Stephanie Brennan of the Nepean Campaign Against Homelessness, decribed how the Inner-City and the Nepean regions were approaching the development of regional homelessness plans.

Special thanks must go to the irrepressable and very competent Katie Price of City fo Sydney who organised the event and worked so hard behind the scenes as well as the Nepean's Tracey Gray who handled registrations with grace and charm.

NSW Government’s five year plan to tackle homelessness

3 August 2009

The NSW Government's "A Way Home: Reducing Homelessness in NSW": NSW Homelessness Action Plan 2009-2014 is now available in full at the Housing NSW website. http://www.housing.nsw.gov.au/

The NSW Homelessness Action Plan, which outlines the direction the State Government will take to tackle homelessness over the next five years, was launched on Sunday 2 August. The Plan contains a broad range of actions that focus on specific target groups that are homeless or vulnerable to homelessness and will help up to 4,350 homeless people or people at risk of homelessness to access or maintain long term accommodation in its first full year of implementation. The Plan is structured under the following three areas:

• preventing homelessness
• responding effectively to homelessness 
•  breaking the cycle.

A critical factor to the success of the Plan is the substantial increase in housing that is underway through the National Partnership Agreement on Social Housing and the Nation Building and Economic Stimulus Plan.

Minister Borger announces Blue Mountains & Nepean Interagency Homelessness Taskforce

This taskforce will be chaired by Phil Koperberg, Member for Blue Mountains, and will focus on local homelessness issues. Its outcomes will feed into the Regional Task Force's development of a regional plan to end homelessness.
Media release Minister Borger