Description:
An innovative program in rural Victoria matches young homeless women with older homeless women and provides them with a range of support services.The result is more stability in the accommodation setting, mutual benefit and satisfaction for clients, and impressive rates of permanent housing outcomes.
Description:
An innovative program in rural Victoria matches young homeless women with older homeless women and provides them with a range of support services.The result is more stability in the accommodation setting, mutual benefit and satisfaction for clients, and impressive rates of permanent housing outcomes.
Description:
Case management has become the predominant model for attempting to improve outcomes for young adults experiencing both homelessness and unemployment. However, there is little evidence-based knowledge about how young adults respond to case management, and how much intervention is needed to be effective. This Australian study utilised quantitative government data to investigate the effects of the amount of case management on key outcomes. With a purposive sample of 224 people aged 18-35, this study compared four different amounts of YP4 case management service received over a three-year period. Participants were categorised into four groupings depending on the number of case management contacts they received: 0-5, 6-20, 21-40, and 41-156. The findings show some significant group variations over the course of the trial in the areas of employment and accommodation. Participants who received 20 or more contacts had significantly better accommodation and employment outcomes than those who received fewer contacts.
Description:
Young people’s subjective experience of homelessness is constituted by particular social processes which to this point have not been explicitly theorized. This article draws on qualitative interviews with young people who have experienced or are experiencing homelessness in order to argue that homelessness carries a symbolic burden, the acknowledgement of which is crucial to understanding the process of embodied subjectivity for young people who have this experience. Popular understandings construct those who experience homelessness as irresponsible, passive and obscene. Young people are aware of this, and this knowledge has consequences for the process of subjectivity for these young people. This article draws on conceptual contributions from Bourdieu and Massumi to theorize the nature of the symbolic burden of homelessness and reflect on the issues involved in understanding the process of subjectivity in the context of this kind of inequality.
Description:
This article aims to contribute to understandings of youth homelessness and subjectivity by analysing identity construction in terms of young people’s negotiation of the structural and institutional environment of youth homelessness. I suggest that while existing literature on this topic concentrates mainly on micro-social encounters, the identities of young people experiencing homelessness can be understood as constructed by structural processes described by Ulrich Beck’s individualisation thesis. Narratives from 20 Australian young people are analysed for how their identities are constructed in their contact with the institutions which govern youth homelessness, and the way these young people make sense of the structural conditions they are facing. Two narrative trajectories are identified. In narratives describing movement into homelessness, young people articulate feelings of failure and shame, consequences of their individualised understanding of their biography. In narratives describing movement out of homelessness into a home, young people articulate feelings of strength and pride, while also describing those who remain homeless in ways which reflect the status of homelessness as a stigmatised difference. This article concludes by discussing the way that structural, institutional and subjective processes interact to produce the identities of young people experiencing homelessness, and reflects on the utility of understanding youth homelessness as a form of individualised social inequality.