Stateside homeless study
AHOMELESSNESS worker from Stockport will carry out research on the other side of the ocean after winning a prestigious award.
Sarah Walters is a development manager at homeless charity Shelter and is one of 12 people from across the north west to scoop a Churchill Travelling Fellowship.
The fellowship will fund a five-week trip to Canada and the USA, where she will research re-housing solutions for vulnerable women.
Sarah, from Heaton Moor, applied to the fund after someone from Australia came to the Shelter offices as part of the fellowship and says she was ‘overwhelmed’ when she found out she had been successful.
“The application process is quite long,” she said. “I applied in September and I had to put together a proposal for the trip.
“I was really pleased when I found out, it is an amazing opportunity and a huge honour as I think there was quite a lot of competition.”
Sarah will start her trip in Vancouver, before making her way south to Seattle, Minneapolis and Washington and she has started planning her itinerary. She hopes to leave in June or July.
She said: “I realised there is hardly any provision out there for women. Homeless women present in quite a different way to men and are often ‘hidden homeless’ as they will be couch surfing or similar because it is so unsafe to sleep on the streets.
“There is hardly anything in terms of solutions, apart from temporary accommodation such as hostels.”
The mum-of-four, who has worked for Shelter for 13 years, says the Housing First scheme – which offers permanent, affordable housing as quickly as possible for individuals and families experiencing homelessness – is ‘good but it does not suit everyone’.
During her trip she will visit homelessness and rehousing schemes for women to learn about methods that are not currently used in the UK.
“I am really looking forward to the trip,” Sarah said. “It is something I would never be able to do as part of my day job.”
The aim behind the fellowship scheme, which has been running since 1965, is to enable individuals to visit different parts of the world in pursuit of ‘new and better ways of tackling a wide range of social, environmental, medical and scientific issues’.