Ending Women’s Homelessness: Homeless Link’s Tampon Tax Fund grants programme

3 Jun 2019 11:55 AM

Blog posted by: Tasmin Maitland, Friday, 31 May 2019.

Homeless Link has been awarded £2 million by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), from the Homelessness strand of the Tampon Tax Fund, to deliver onward grants to charities working with women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in England. The programme will open for first stage submissions at the end of June 2019.

Women who are homeless or rough sleeping, or at risk of it, are one of the most marginalised groups in our society. The recent scoping report from Homeless Link and the Women’s Resource Centre showed that services are seeing an increasing number of women who are homeless and facing multiple disadvantage. There is a growing recognition of the need to develop gender and trauma-informed support for women. However, the current lack of gender informed provision and safe spaces, alongside insufficient training and expertise among staff, continue to be barriers to supporting these women out of homelessness.

The Ending Women’s Homelessness grants programme aims to provide charities, both large and small, with resources to develop effective gender and trauma-informed services, and encourage cross-sector working between the homelessness and women’s sectors.

What we will fund

Grants will fund work that increases gender-informed services and cross-sector working, transforming the support of women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.

Projects might, for example:

• Increase capacity for women-only provision
• Create women-only spaces and specialist support in mixed services
• Develop partnerships between the women’s and homelessness sectors
• Increase opportunities for the co-location of services
• Identify prevention opportunities with women who are hidden homeless
• Up-skill homelessness staff to work with issues such as domestic abuse
• Up-skill women’s sector staff to work with multiple and complex needs
• Enable homelessness and women’s sectors to contribute to the implementation of Local Authority strategies
• Improve pathways into services to reduce the number of women sleeping rough
• Pilot or embed targeted interventions for under-represented groups of women such as BAME, youth, LGBTQI, women with offending histories, and women with no recourse to public funds (NRPF).

This is not a definitive list – projects should be responsive to their local context and to the needs of women who will be accessing funded services.

We’re keen to see applications from both homelessness and women’s charities; cross-sector collaborations that make the best use of expertise to benefit women accessing services; and the involvement of women with lived experience in project design and/or delivery.

The Ending Women’s Homelessness programme will launch at the end of June 2019. For further details see the project page.

Next steps

Full criteria and process will be published at the end of June. In the meantime, start developing your proposal and making contact with potential partners. You might find it helpful to read research from Homeless Link, Agenda and AVA that has informed our development of the grants programme.

Please note that we are currently unable to respond to individual enquiries, please refer to the project pagefor latest updates.

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• Ending Women's Homelessness

  Homeless Link has been awarded £2 million by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), from the Homelessness strand of the Tampon Tax Fund, to deliver onward grants to charities working with women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in England. The programme will open for first stage submissions at the end of June 2019.