TECH BRINGS HOPE TO DESPERATE ROUGH SLEEPERS
Charities are using apps to help the homeless find their way back into the economy, reports Claire Corkery
The role of slinger-signaller on a building site is a specialist job that can make the difference between life and death.
Tasked with making hand signals that direct crane and equipment operators, it’s a job that requires training and reliability.
For one worker on the new extension to London’s Underground Northern line, “Joe”, the new position is a vindication of his battle to overcome the deprivations of homelessness. It is also the product of a new wave of entrepreneurs bringing capital and technology to assist the growing army of the dispossessed.
Joe has gone through a lot to get the slinger-signaller job. Having struggled with health issues, he was homeless for over a decade before undergoing treatment in 2017. After recovering, he was helped back into work by a pioneering new scheme using crowdfunding to deliver skills training and get the homeless back into full-time employment.
Homelessness has soared in Britain over the past decade, and there are currently more than 300,000 people living without permanent accommodation.
In England in 2017, an estimated 4,751 people were sleeping rough – up 15 per cent on the previous year.
Under pressure to address the problem, the British government has pledged to halve the number of rough sleepers by 2022 and eradicate rough sleeping altogether by 2027 using a £30 million (Dh156m) fund given to local councils.
But the government drive to end rough sleeping only addresses a small part of a complex issue.
London is home to nearly a quarter of all rough sleepers in England, and the highly visible suffering has spurred residents to respond with their own ideas.
One of them is tech entrepreneur Alex Stephany, the former chief executive of parking app JustPark.
Last year, he started his own charity called Beam, a crowdfunding platform to help homeless people train up and get back into work.
Having previously used equity crowdfunding during his tenure at the head of a tech start-up to raise Dh22.7m from 2,700 people, Mr Stephany, 36, began to think about how he could use his skills to benefit those most in need.
“I thought, wow, this is a really powerful model. Can we use crowdfunding to help some of the most vulnerable people in society as well?” Mr Stephany tells The National. It was after having a conversation with a homeless man at his local tube station that the idea for Beam came about.
“We were talking about his ambitions. He’d spent a very long time out of work and I just had a really simple thought: I’ve seen this person is a nice individual with a lot to contribute, and I thought, what can I do now? I can buy them a coffee or give them some cash, but for me, that wasn’t enough.
“I asked myself, how can I make a really smart positive investment in this person’s future that will help this individual for the long-term and will help this individual’s children as well?”
Having consulted with homelessness charities, he recognised that barriers to finding work kept people dependent on temporary accommodation. So Mr Stephany created a model by which people could gain the skills they needed to get back into permanent and meaningful employment.
Beam works by identifying potential “members” – people who have been homeless – before talking with them about their career goals and putting together an exact budget for their training. Their online campaign is set up and they are crowdfunded for the amount they need for the training.
Joe was one of the first Beam members, and has aspirations to become a better-paid crane rigger one day.
His online campaign raised £1,132 from 19 supporters in just five days and he was able to undertake his slinger-signaller course within a matter of weeks, a qualification he passed with flying colours.
Joe tells The National he struggled to find employment for a long time before his training: “There was nothing for me until Beam came along ... I was looking for work but it was looking bleak.”
Within three months of completing is qualification, Joe is working for a large construction labour supplier, VGC Group. The crowdfunding experience has given him new opportunities, as well as a confidence boost. “It made me feel so much better,” he says.
“I thought it would take months, but within five days the money was there and I was ready for training. The fact that people out there are willing to give me their money to do training has made me want to prove myself even more. It was so uplifting.”
Beam is one of a growing number of organisations in the UK harnessing technology to help the homeless.
Perhaps the best known example is StreetLink, an app and website created by charity Homeless Link, which allows the public to send an alert when they see someone sleeping rough. With a description of where and when the individual was seen, an outreach team can locate them and connect them to the appropriate support services.
During the recent cold weather in the UK, social media users shared links to the StreetLink app as fears were raised about people sleeping outside freezing to death in the sub-zero temperatures. In the week commencing February 26, in which there was heavy snowfall, StreetLink received 35,000 alerts – the most in one week since its inception in 2012.
Homelessness is a complex problem, which cannot be solved by simply throwing money at it ALEX STEPHANY Founder, Beam crowdfunding platform
Of course, advancing technology is not the solution to a homelessness crisis primarily caused by the lack of affordable housing in Britain, argues Patrick Mulrenan, senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University.
“The main obvious cause of the rise in homelessness is cost of housing, which reflects the short supply of housing,” he tells The National.
“The poor supply is because we haven’t built enough homes for the past 30 or 40 years.”
To start to address the issue of homelessness, a bigger supply of housing is needed, Mr Mulrenan says. “In one way or another, we have to invest money in housing.
At the moment it is done the wrong way and [the state has] invested in Housing Benefit, which comes to £24bn a year.
“That is a huge amount of money which is not productive money, because it is going into the hands of landlords and is not building any more homes.”
Government solutions such as building more houses are years away from making a difference, so Mr Stephany believes technology and micro-credit support schemes have a role to play.
“Homelessness is a complex problem, which cannot be solved by simply throwing money at it. It requires significant amounts of innovation, technology and data,” he says.
Another supporter of this ethos is Martin Stone, who has been running the Muswell Hill soup kitchen in north London for the past 10 years.
It recently began giving its visitors smartphones.
“Phones are the vital lifeblood of being on the street,” Mr Stone tells The National.
“Having a phone gives you half a chance. It allows you to stay in communication with people who can help. It is just where we are in 2018.”
With free Wi-Fi offered in many places around London, a smartphone is an essential piece of modern technology for homeless people, and can even save lives.
Before giving a homeless person a phone, Mr Stone and his team of volunteers download software onto it from the UK National Health Service, suicide awareness charities and Next Meal, which maps the opening hours of London’s soup kitchens. Mr Stone, who also works as a housing lecturer, created the Next Meal app and website with the help of a Silicon Valley tech expert last year.
“We created Next Meal because we did not want people begging on the street,” says Mr Stone, who got the idea while using an app at a bus stop. “Begging is bad for anyone’s self-esteem, and some people are begging because they are being controlled by gangs.”
A user can either download the app or go to the website, type in their location and a list of nearby shelters and the facilities they offer appears.
Anyone wishing to help a rough sleeper can do so by using Next Meal and pointing them to their nearest soup kitchen. Or better still, they can donate an old smartphone to Muswell Hill soup kitchen, which will give it to a homeless person who can download the app themselves.
“What the world needs is ideas that fit a certain situation for a certain time,” says Mr Stone, who hopes to roll out Next Meal throughout Europe.
“That’s what technology does. And when it doesn’t work, it dies instantly.”