Finding Collective Solutions
Rock Trust are the A Way Home Scotland founder, we co-ordinate the group and our CEO Kate Polson is chair.
Our coalition includes partners from housing, homelessness, education, youth work, families, health, and justice. We know that youth homelessness is not just a housing issue, and we support individuals and organisations from across sectors to address youth homelessness in their area.
Our focus is prevention, partnership and innovation which we achieve by working together, sharing best practice, influencing decision-makers and shaping policy. We inspire and facilitate change by promoting and developing preventative strategies to end youth homelessness at local and national levels.
Collective Impact
A Way Home Scotland adopts a collective impact approach, which means members from diverse sectors and regions work together to achieve a shared goal: preventing youth homelessness.
These are the five principles of collective impact:
- A common agenda: all members share an understanding of the problem and actions needed to solve it.
- Shared measurement for data and results: everyone collects and shares findings so that everyone is accountable.
- Mutually reinforcing activities: everyone has a plan of action, with meaningful engagement for all members.
- Open and continuous communications: we stay connected to each other regularly to build trust, agree helpful objectives, and maintain motivation.
- A backbone organisation: we at Rock Trust have the expertise on youth homelessness and are dedicated to co-ordinate the group and ensure we can all act together.
Collective impact believes that no one organisation, policy or program can tackle, let alone solve, increasingly complex and entrenched social problems. Instead, it calls for an organisational approach where co-ordinated resources can drive action at both local and national levels. This is the approach of A Way Home Scotland.
Our Approach:
To ensure services work together and our strategies and resources are aligned, we’ve recruited the unusual suspects, with members not only from housing and homelessness, but from education, health, youth justice and youth work.
Poverty remains the main driver of homelessness, and relationship breakdown is the main cause. We work together to understand these issues, conducting research with partners across sectors, finding the unique challenges in different regions.
We’re committed to influence change in systems, practices and cultures, and to move from a crisis-based approach to a prevention-based approach.
This shift would enable us to reach young people before a crisis happens, as well as ensuring they have the support they need to resolve any crisis.
We were inspired by the A Way Home model in North America, which has achieved transformational change, with some communities halving youth homelessness.
Check out “The Road Map for the Prevention of Youth Homelessness” to understand their approach in Canada.
Join our Coalition
Get in touch to find out more about becoming a member of the A Way Home Scotland Coalition.