How NSW started the journey to end street sleeping
Pictured Left to Right: Prue Goward, then Minister for Family and Community Services; Ann Hoban, Director City Life at City of Sydney; James Toomey, CEO Mission Australia; Baroness Casey of Blackstone DBE CB, Chairman Institute of Global Homelessness; Lesley Butt, State Manager Homelessness NSW/ACT, The Salvation Army; Gladys Berejiklian, Premier NSW; Rev Keith Garner AM, CEO Wesley Mission; Jack de Groot, CEO St Vincent de Paul Society NSW; Anthony Schembri AM, CEO, St Vincent’s Health Network Sydney; Zoe Robinson, CEO Yfoundations.
In her quest to end homelessness globally, Baroness Casey of Blackstone CB DBE calls upon cities to ‘do something different that might work better.’ NSW is doing just that.
On 13 February 2019 NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian announced a joint commitment between the Institute of Global Homelessness, the City of Sydney, the NSW Government, and the sector’s leading NGOs to a collaboration and set targets to end street sleeping.
The Collaboration aims to:
Reduce rough sleeping in the City of Sydney by 25% by 2020 (using City of Sydney’s Street Count from February 2017 – February 2020)
Reduce rough sleeping in the City of Sydney and NSW by 50% by 2025 (baseline and data collection to be established with partners by 2020)
Work toward zero rough sleeping in the City of Sydney and NSW
In her announcement, Premier Berejiklian said ‘… we cannot be complacent and by signing this agreement we are pushing ourselves to do even more... We have set this target to halve street homelessness across the entire state by 2025’.
Signatories to the agreement were:
The Collaboration parties have already established a by-name database of people who are sleeping rough and developing ‘up-stream’ and social housing strategies to prevent homelessness.