Helping the Sydney community with relationships, parenting, ageing, disability, pastoral services and mental wellbeing.
In 2017, Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP called Catholic agencies (St Vincent’s de Paul, St Vincent’s Hospital and CatholicCare) together to work on the wicked problem of ending street homelessness.
In February 2019, the Premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian, signed a joint commitment between the Institute of Global Homelessness, City of Sydney, NSW Government and the sector’s leading NGOs that set targets to halve street sleeping by 2025 and eliminate it across NSW by 2030.
As a founding partner and the Archbishop’s representative, CatholicCare is proud to be a signatory to the End Street Sleeping Collaboration, joining NSW’s leading not-for-profits dedicated to ending homelessness, state and local government agencies and community members to work together to meet these ambitious goals.
The issue of homelessness is confronting and complicated, but it is solvable. People become homeless for a wide variety of reasons such as mental health, domestic violence or lack of affordable housing. Each person is different, and because of this we know that simply putting someone in a home isn’t enough to solve the problem. While housing is a key part of the solution, each individual also needs a variety of support services to help them stay in their home.
The Act to End Street Sleeping project aims to change the systems of government and care so as to prevent people from sleeping on the street at all. The work of ending street sleeping is complex but the benefits to our society and economy are enormous… and the benefits to the individuals who are street sleeping are so vast as to be unimaginable.
This is the very aim of the collaboration. To work together, and enlist each member’s area of expertise and role in the system to make all the necessary steps, large and small, towards ending homelessness in NSW.
To learn more or volunteer to assist the collaboration visit endstreetsleeping.org.