Ending homelessness in the inner city through service coordination: Feasibility study - Final report

Inspired by activities in the US, in particular the 100,000 Homes and Built for Zero Campaigns to end homelessness (Community Solutions 2020), the Adelaide Zero Project was launched in August 2017 as a focused initiative to end a particular form of homelessness – street homelessness or rough sleeping– in a defined area, the Adelaide inner city area (Tually et al. 2017, 2018, Adelaide Zero Project 2018).The project adopted the Functional Zero approach to achieve this end; a model for ending homelessness developed in the US by Community Solutions (Community Solutions 2016, 2018) and now adopted in other jurisdictions in Australia, as well as across the US and Canada. The approach began in the US as a challenge to end veterans and chronic homelessness, but in Adelaide agreement was reached on an initial focus on rough sleepers in the inner city to prove the efficacy of the model with a highly vulnerable population. Adelaide’s inner city has long been the capture point for rough sleepers in SA and is the site of concentration of many of the services funded and designed to meet their needs. In September 2018, and as part of the recognition of Adelaide as a Vanguard City by the IGH, Dame Louise Casey and Dr Nonie Brennan visited Adelaide to review progress in the city’s push to reduce and ultimately end rough sleeping.1 In February 2019, a report was released detailing six key recommendations to improve homelessness services in the inner city.2 One of these six recommendations identified the need for service and system level innovation, particularly the coordination of key inner city homelessness and outreach services (Casey and Brennan 2019)