The project’s objective is to contribute to the social inclusion of homeless people and help them find their way out of homelessness, using learning as a tool. Society at large, homeless people and organizations and individuals working with homeless people are the target groups of the project. Without having a basic understanding the complex social phenomenon of homelessness, people are bound to have preconceptions and prejudice. Homeless people often face stigma, and experience losing employment, housing, friendships when it turns out that they are homeless. These days homelessness is present in urban settings around the globe, yet it is one of the social issues surrounded with the most shame and rejection. This rejection is a main obstacle to the social inculsion of homeless people. Well-designed authentic opportunities for the general public to learn about homelessness can help fight against rejection. Homeless people face many obstacles to social participation, in addition to the lack of adequate housing: often they have low education levels, difficult access to jobs, a lack of personal suppport system, health or other personal difficulties. Skills development, through real-life tasks or non-vocational learning tailored to their situation and complex needs, is an important means to facilitate their social inclusion. Organizations working with homeless people – or other marginalized groups- can decide to provide non-formal education to their clients in several forms (such as traning in literacy, personal finances, digital skills, emplyment skills, self-represenation and advocacy, peer learning opportunities, clubs, arts programmes, to name a few). The partners believe that client involvement is an important aspect of both awareness-raising about homelessness, and in the functioning of services for homeless people. The empowerment of homeless people by their active participation as also one of the core aims ot the project. The present project aims to collect and observe these services by involving partner organizations from two Central Estern European and two Western European countries. All the activities of the project will contribute to the development of two intellectual products and the capacity building of the participating organizations. Exchange of experience and training of homeless or formerly homeless people, professionals from the fields of social support and communication will also take place and serve the same purpose. The partners will develop a toolkit based on selected good practices for awareness-raising and client involvement, providing users with a theoretical and practical material to design and implement their own activities in this field. In the framework of the international visual arts competition designed and advertised by partners, amateur and professional, homeless and non-homeless artists will be invited to create pieces of visual arts that have a message reducing the above described prejudice. An album and an online collection with free access will be created from the pieces of visual arts received in the competition. The collection is designed from the beginning for use after the project period by a wide audience, journalists, researchers, professional support workers and organizations that work with homeless people, or touch the topic of homelessness. Positive messages in the images with a strong artistic value created by popular or unknown artists will appear in professional journals, street papers, annual reports and online surface of NGOs.
Social integration of homeless people requires homeless people and homeless service providers to address complex challenges. The project focused on two of these, each of them a massive barrier to social participation: individual needs of skills development on one hand, and attitudes towards homelessness in mainstream society on the other. Our main aim was to involve as many as possible experts by experience into the implementation of the project, for social integration of them and to implement a project that Participation in such projects and activities have a great empowering impact on our clients. The involvement of homeless people in the design and implementation of such programs, especially if accompanied by adequate training and mentoring from support workers or peers, has a great empowerment potential, and it also offers opportunities to learn new skills. We also consider the number of people reached by the dissemination of the project to be a serious result, to whom we showed not only projects dealing with the topic of homelessness, but also projects in which homeless people appear as speakers, creators, and experts, which are implemented by homeless people.
We are aware and research also shows that prejudice is greatly responsible for the marginalization of people experiencing homelessness and housing poverty. With the support of Erasmus+ we aimed to raise awareness about homelessness with the involvement of homeless people themselves. Through the activities, supported by the grant, bridges were built between the majority society and people experiencing homelessness, which is the starting point for social inclusion. We see both of our intellectual products as suitable for being used beyond homeless care, because prejudices do not only affect the lives of homeless people, but also members of communities with disabilities, people with psychiatric illnesses or any other minority groups. The good practices and methods we have collected can also be useful for professionals and activists working with the these communities.