Homelessness activity maintenance overview

In principle there are two ways of approaching homelessness, and these can be summarised as either tackling the situation after it has arisen, or focusing on prevention using a range of resources, proactive measures and data analysis. For housing authorities to make a positive impact on preventing homelessness, a key focus area for their coordinated strategy is to provide people with the ways and means to meet their housing needs, including the provision of any housing-related support they might require to avoid experiencing homelessness, whether that be to enable them to remain in their current home or, where appropriate, to delay an impending move until such time as alternative accommodation can be planned, with a view to sustaining their independent living. Typically, a housing authority will focus on three distinct stages where timely intervention can prevent homelessness:

Early Identification - Determined through the definition of 'society categories', representing people who are potentially at risk of homelessness, this approach then makes provision for suitable accommodation and any necessary support services in order to mitigate that risk. Such early identification targets individuals who are within known indicator groups, including those leaving local authority care, prison, secure accommodation or the armed forces, together with those likely to have mental or physical health problems. Whilst those groups might not have an imminent housing need, opportune intervention can avoid homelessness in the future, at such time as they leave their institutional environment.
Pre-crisis Intervention - Such action is crucial, even if only to delay the date on which a person has to leave their current home, as this may allow sufficient time to plan and manage a move to alternative accommodation, ensuring the individual keeps a level of control and influence. This stage of intervention may take the form of counselling provided by the housing advice service, or perhaps acting as an advocate in delicate landlord negotiations.
Preventing Recurring Homelessness - The provision of accommodation alone might be insufficient to prevent homelessness, particularly in circumstances where the situation is exacerbated by, say, alcohol or drug misuse, and therefore a holistic approach is required in order to tackle the root causes and thus achieve tenancy sustainment.

Clearly, prevention is not always possible, but the provision of suitable, settled accommodation, underpinned by ongoing support, is essential in transforming the life chances of homeless people and significantly reducing the risk of such a situation reoccurring. When applying the principles of an agreed homelessness strategy into the configuration settings of Civica Cx Housing, an end user can create any number of custom activities to reflect the lifecycle of a case, under three core classification types: Prevention and Relief, Assessment or Review. As each activity is linked to a category, which in turn is mapped to an overarching master status - Prevention and Relief or Homelessness - the range of possible characteristics is filtered accordingly and serves to control the inclusion and management of that activity as an integral part of the case. Whilst most homelessness case activities may be applicable to all members of the contact group, a further setting is available to control the target applicant cohort: All Contacts, Main Applicant, Responsible Contacts or Select on Creation. As a sub-component of each case, a homelessness activity will comprise any number of discrete or inter-dependent tasks that are then employed to steer its progression. At the end user's discretion, these can be added in isolation, or they can be linked by virtue of their inclusion within a task path workflow structure, mapping out the task-oriented framework by which inquiries and support services are undertaken.

Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of homelessness activity maintenance, including: