Men and women tend to both become and experience homelessness in different ways. This difference is reflected in the support they need. We know homelessness services are doing their very best to support a diverse range of people. But funding streams and stretched budgets can make it difficult to mould practice to better fit women’s needs. At the same time, in the world of competitive tendering, services need to demonstrate their effectiveness. If the majority of people accessing support are men, then it makes business sense to focus support towards them. This then reproduces a system that doesn’t properly represent women’s needs.  

To help alter this picture, Homeless Link is seeking to build on its recent report into the Impacts and Insights of our Ending Women’s Homelessness Fund through piloting a new programme with six distinct teams within mixed-sex homelessness services who want to become more gender informed. The experiences of the six services involved will then play a key role in Homeless Link’s plan to develop a new toolkit to help gender inform services across the country to better support women experiencing homelessness.  

The pilot will follow Homeless Link’s five key principles for effective working with women, which are underpinned by gender and trauma informed approaches. They have been developed based on evidence and learning from the Ending Women’s Homelessness Fund.