HOME Advice Evaluation

Since 1994, early intervention has become a major policy orientation within the homelessness area, particularly for young people. Early intervention was first officially canvassed in the House of Representatives Report on Aspects of Youth Homelessness (1995), and then taken up as the core theme of the Prime Minister’s Youth Homelessness Taskforce. This Taskforce fielded 26 pilot early intervention projects from 1997-99. Following this, the Commonwealth Government launched the Reconnect program with $20m of recurrent funds, deploying early intervention workers in communities across Australia.

The notion of ‘early intervention’ can be applied to a range of issues, but in the context of homelessness it does not imply early in life but as early as possible in the actual experience of homelessness. The positive response to early intervention has opened up policy thinking to a broader conception about deploying public policy responses to homelessness.

Early intervention is grounded in the concept of homelessness as a process or a ‘career’ with changes in the life of the homeless person over time. This concept is the basis for the new thinking about homelessness as a ‘career process’, or a series of biographical transitions from one stage to another (MacKenzie and Chamberlain, 2003; Chamberlain and MacKenzie 1998).

MacKenzie and Chamberlain’s 2003 publication on homeless careers identified three pathways into adult homelessness:

• Housing crisis, where poverty and accumulating debt frequently underpin the slide into homelessness;

• Family breakdown and family violence, where homelessness results from family relationship discord and/or violence; and

• The transition from youth homelessness into adult homelessness, where homeless young people continue their homeless career into young adulthood.

One important factor that emerges from this research is the implication for early identification and early intervention. Unlike the youth homelessness career trajectory, adult and family homelessness does not offer the same ‘window of opportunity’ for early intervention as has been found for young people. Early intervention has commonly been understood as reaching young people who are homeless or are at imminent risk of becoming homeless, as soon as possible after they become homeless. The term often used is ‘recently homeless’ and it usually refers to within one month, but this is not a strict duration.

Early intervention is concerned with the appropriate support for young people who are recently homeless, where reconciliation with family is a real possibility even though it may not always be achieved. Early intervention work is also working with young people who are homeless but still attending school and still attached to their community. If attachments to school and community can be maintained than a young person may be homeless but they are less likely to drift into transience and move down the homeless career path. This form of intervention is possible because there are usually clear indicators of ‘risk’ in a young person’s life prior to them becoming homeless. School welfare staff, for example, will often be aware of family difficulties in a student’s life, the young person may have ‘run away’ from home and then returned on a number of occasions or there may have been instances where the young person has stayed with friends as a result of family conflict (i.e. couch surfing).

For adults and families this ‘in and out’ stage of the homeless career path is less obvious, and in some cases non existent. In many cases some people will not approach support services until they are facing imminent eviction or are on the very brink of homelessness. The opportunity for early intervention has passed once the ‘sharp break’ from their housing has occurred, as the problems that have led to such a crisis tend to exacerbate when families find themselves without appropriate shelter.

SAAP IV provides the overarching framework for much of what will be done for homeless people over the next five years or so. However, in policy terms homelessness is now more than SAAP and this broadened scope has happened largely because of ‘early intervention’ and through important work done under SAAP IV to develop strategic whole of government approaches to homelessness by several state jurisdictions. The Victorian Homelessness Strategy is notable but similar work has been done in Western Australia and the ACT, while in South Australia, the Government through the Social Inclusion Unit has highlighted homelessness as an issue for major policy work and program development.