GROW
Over the past three years, through its
GROW (Giving Real Opportunities for Work) Project,
Thames Reach has undergone a culture change whereby it now employs current and former service users across all teams and functions. The huge success of this major initiative meant the target of 10% of their workforce having an experience of homelessness by 2007 was exceeded. Indeed, service user employment has risen consistently so that today over 17% of Thames Reach staff have experienced homelessness.
Designed to increase employment of people with first-hand knowledge and experience of homelessness and the use of homelessness services, GROW set out to:
- improve the quality of the services Thames Reach provide by benefiting from former homeless people’s expertise and enthusiasm
- recognise and utilise the immense value of the former homeless as influential and positive role models for current service users
- address the discrimination homeless people face in the employment market
- encourage other homelessness organisations to follow suit.
To fulfil this remit, the GROW scheme now offers a national consultancy service. Set up in late 2008 to develop service user employment opportunities, this focuses on the benefits and challenges of employing service users, identifying and overcoming organisational barriers, and developing routes into employment.
Support from the London Housing Foundation
The seeds for GROW were sown in 2003 when a team of agencies, with support from the London Housing Foundation in the form of a travel bursary, visited
schemes tackling homelessness in New York where service user employment is far more common.
Later, Thames Reach and
Broadway jointly commissioned a six-month piece of research to identify the structural, practical and attitudinal barriers that prevented organisations employing homeless people and to suggest solutions to these. Funded in part by the London Housing Foundation, the conclusions from the research informed the work plan for the first years of the GROW project.
The Foundation also funded a survey, between October 2007 and February 2008, to establish how many homelessness agencies had schemes to encourage and support the employment of former service users, and sponsored a national seminar ‘Employing Service Users’ in October 2007.
The seminar, for homelessness agencies actively engaged in employing the current and former homeless, gave agencies the opportunity to explore the benefits and challenges of employing current and former service users, and to investigate the business case for this. It drew significantly on the GROW programme.
The results from the survey and seminar fed into Thames Reach’s national conference: Making the Extraordinary Ordinary - Employing Service Users in the Homelessness Sector, which took place in April 2008. Led by
Homeless Link and Thames Reach, in partnership with the London Housing Foundation, Off the Streets and Into Work, and
SITRA, the one-day conference was designed to inform working practices and encourage the employment of homeless people within the homelessness sector. It also explored the benefits of service user employment as well as possible barriers and solutions, and was backed up by existing models of good practice.
London Housing Foundation’s then Executive Director Kevin Ireland said: ‘Employing service users is not about 'hanging on' to clients or even providing a “safe haven” for them to work in. It's about acknowledging and developing their talents and experiences and giving them a real chance to be part of a solution rather than a problem. Importantly, it's also about opening up the organisations that provide services to homeless people to a greater influence from those who have been homeless.’