How others is doing?
To address appropriate “creativitiveness” to help homeless people is always a challenge to me. For example, How can I make a project that is relavant to homeless people and society? How can I build a bridge that facilitate constructive and collaborative values? These questions lead me to explore how other creative organisations or designers is doing to address the issue:
Change Please
—Change Please is backed by the Big Issue, which harness the nation’s love of coffee by setting up a number of mobile coffee trucks and paying homeless people the living wage to run and work at them.
The project goes beyond simply providing shelter, and gives workers the opportunity to provide for themselves so they can get off the streets and back on track.
Change Please also underwrites the tenancies of its workers so that they are able to secure accommodation in a rental market that is impossible to enter without a deposit.
After six months, the charity will help the person secure a full-time job with an established coffee chain. It is hoped that Change Please will help around 200 homeless people a year.
Mobile laundry service, Australia
Two friends in Brisbane, Australia, have started a mobile service to help homeless people keep their clothes and bedding clean.
Lucas Patchett and Nicholas Marchesi, both 21, set up the mobile launderette with two washing machines in the back of a van, powered by a generator.
The aim, they say, is to restore the dignity of people sleeping rough and ensure their basic right to hygiene. A year and a half after setting up, Orange Sky Laundry now operates in six cities across Australia, powered by donations and the help of hundreds of volunteers.
But it doesn’t stop at clean clothes, the project is aiming to pair up with food vans, so that those visiting can get a good, hot meal while they wait for their belongings.
Awareness-raising shelter, Canada
A housing charity in Vancouver, Canada has found a novel way to both raise awareness and keep the rain from the city’s rough sleepers, which amount to nearly 2000 people.
RainCity teamed up with Spring Advertising to create a bench that folds out to provide a simple shelter.
Though they’re not a permanent feature in the city, they have certainly done their part in raising awareness of the problem of homelessness in Vancouver and worldwide.
They gained a great deal of media attention in light of the ‘homes not spikes’ backlash following the decision of a building in London to install spikes on its boundaries to deter rough sleepers.
Pop-up homes for families, London
A new development of 24 ‘pop-up homes’ has been constructed on the site of a former leisure centre in south London.
Unhappy that the site would remain unoccupied for several years before permanent housing was built, Lewisham council had the temporary two-bedroom homes erected.
PLACE/Ladywell will house families who would otherwise be placed in bed and breakfast and temporary accommodation.
The housing is created from factory-constructed blocks, which can be dismantled after use and rebuilt in another location—therefore providing an affordable and enduring solution to the many unoccupied pieces of land across the country.
Finding space in usual places, London
An architectural firm’s proposal to turn disused parking garages in east London into pop-up homes has won funding and is in the process of planning.
Levitt Bernstein’s design, entitled HAWSE (Homes through Apprenticeships With Skills for Employment) won a building design competition run by the Building Trust, a charity dedicated to providing homes to those in need around the world.
HAWSE makes the most of unused space in highly populated areas by inhabiting disused garages on existing housing estates and providing not only a home, but the opportunity to learn about construction techniques.
The Building Trust have also secured funding for a number of other innovating housing solutions in Cambodia and the Thai/Burmese border, including housing and schools projects.