WIREDGOV

Blog posted by: Sam Lloyd, Tuesday, 1 September 2015

Framework's Sam Lloyd, who leads the Nottingham Street Outreach Team, gives an inisght into life as an outreach worker. 

My colleagues and I currently operate a Street Outreach Service in Nottingham City. Over the course of the last few years we have also provided the Rough Sleeping response across most of Lincolnshire, parts of Nottinghamshire and the small but beautifully proportioned Rutland.

These locations - urban, rural and coastal - present all sorts of challenges and each poses its own dangers to the exposed sleeper, whether experienced or spending their first night outside.

The importance of information

As a small team covering such a wide area, we rely heavily upon the information we receive about locations. The only thing harder than looking for a needle in a haystack is if that haystack is hidden in a pitch-black, rained soaked forest three hours shy of sunrise. Without the referrals we receive via Streetlink, through our free text service and localised freephone telephone number, we would miss so many rough sleepers.

The days that don’t start with a 5am alarm clock tend to start with a 4 am alarm clock. We’ll drag ourselves to wherever we’re meeting our work partner (the potential risks we might face mean doubling up at all times) for the morning.  And if we haven’t had a chance on the way into work, we’ll whip out our smartphones and access the emails that our on-call colleague would have sent to us through the night.

In these emails we will learn about any locations for rough sleepers we may need to check, along with any relevant information and any concerns we may need to be wary of. If there’s time for a takeaway coffee then we might grab one of those, and we’re off on our walk about for the next few hours.

Entrenchment and resistance

We often come across people who are resistant to our assistance. They may have written off all support agencies and think that no-one can help them. They may be under the influence of some mood altering substance that proves to be too much of a barrier to communication at that particular time; they may be suffering undiagnosed or diagnosed Mental Health difficulties; or they may simply not trust strangers. In all of these cases, we persist. We don’t let the fact that someone doesn’t want to work with us stop us from trying to help them identify a housing option.

There are discussions held elsewhere about the freedom of an individual to rough sleep. We take as a starting point the viewpoint that the risk to that individual – including the research that shows rough sleepers die younger – as well as the expense to the public purse of the Emergency Services’ increased responses to rough sleepers, mean we have a responsibility to help people realise this increased danger. If this means persisting with someone for months on end, we do.

Without Streetlink, or our text and phone line services, we would never have found Mark, now accommodated, who spent 20 years sleeping in a tent beside a rural A-road. We wouldn’t have discovered Pawel, an economic migrant who didn’t understand his rights and entitlements hidden on an allotment near Nottingham.

Karol, who we accompanied to Poland to drop off at his grateful father’s house might have died from the tuberculosis he contracted on the Streets of Nottingham had we not helped him and got him to hospital. Sharon, 16 and pregnant, may not have found her way into social services support for a number of days. These four ‘successful outcomes’, along with very literally thousands of others since the service took on its current form in 2012 reflect very well not only on the hard work of my colleagues, but also the absolutely crucial nature of the referral mechanisms like Streetlink.

So, next time you see someone sleeping rough, help them and contact Streetlink.