The Homeful research was undertaken over the course of 2022, with a generous housing industry research grant to allow a research assistant to be recruited for the period.
The purpose of the Homeful research was to work in co-production with housing professionals, homelessness charity leaders, social housing tenants and people with experience of homelessness, to explore housing-led approaches to resolving and preventing homelessness. During 2022 housing associations, local authorities, charities and tenant organisations spoke with us, or answered survey questions, or hosted a Homeful workshop in their organisation so that we could better understand how people viewed their meaning of home and the challenges they saw in tackling homelessness.
All of the data was analysed in the early Autumn 2022 and brought together in a report published by CIH available here and available on their webpage www.cih.org/homeful
Conditions of Home
A debate on the Homeful research findings at the CIH 2023 conference in Manchester adapted Richardson’s (2019) conditions framework with a new additional condition – ‘flexibility’
People of the Streets
We were also fortunate to work alongside other partner organisations in the housing sector, for example on a social media campaign run by So Crowd called ‘Home Is’. A photovoice project for homeful was run in partnership with People of the Streets
De Montfort University Creative Project
Additionally, there was a linked creative project funded by De Montfort University, to amplify the voices of women with lived experience of homelessness in Leicester, this was a collaboration with InHerStrength. There was a final ‘scratch production’ which was performed at the Y Theatre in Leicester in July 2022 – To watch this performance, please use the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pzQTFGwx9w
Place and Identity: The Performance of Home Book
Jo’s book ‘Place and Identity: the Performance of Home’ was published in 2019. It’s premise was that a physical dwelling was necessary, but not sufficient to create ‘home’. The book identified six additional ‘conditions’ for home – these were instrumental to the conceptual framing of the Homeful research project.
