Over £200,000 to support homelessness projects

£211,000 has been awarded to projects that aim to prevent homelessness, work with vulnerable people on the streets and inform people about changes to their benefits, Welsh Labour’s Housing, Regeneration and Heritage Minister Huw Lewis announced today.

The funding, which has been reallocated from identified underspends across the homelessness budget, has been allocated to eight projects across Wales that will deliver a range of services including:

• Supporting Rough Sleepers with Winter Funding: £60,000 To get people off the streets and provide essential aid to avoid serious harm and suffering;
• Work It Out: £12,000 To provide advice and raise awareness to people at risk of becoming homelessness as a result of loss of employment or reduced income;
• Improving Homelessness Prevention: £67,000 To provide intensive consultancy advice to all local authorities to improve prevention; provide a prevention toolkit and five regional workshops;
• Your Benefits are Changing Road Shows: £10,000 To promote understanding of the changes to Housing Benefit coming in from April 2013, and to provide face to face advice and support;
• Developing good practice in assisting those who are homeless or vulnerably housed and have Dual Diagnosis Issues;
• £30,000 To develop a best practice guide in assisting those with dual diagnosis issues to be disseminated to local authorities across Wales;
• Going Digital: £8,000 to expand Shelter Cymru’s existing outreach advice service;
• House Swap Wales Facebook Project: £12,000 To create a forum to help social housing tenants to exchange properties to avert the impact of the impending changes to Housing Benefit;
• Facilitating the Homelessness White Paper Events: £12,000 To facilitate three national stakeholder events to help inform the implementation of the white paper.