The Royal Foundation’s Homewards programme is over halfway through its five‑year plan, with work underway across six locations in the UK to prevent homelessness before it happens.
To mark this moment, Homewards is hosting a series of six locally-led events taking place across each Homewards location: Lambeth, Sheffield, Newport, Northern Ireland, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, and Aberdeen.
The events have been designed to reflect how Homewards works: locally-led, shaped by partners on the ground, and focused on long‑term change rather than short‑term crisis response.
Why the Festival matters
Over the past three years, Homewards partners across the UK have been testing and delivering new approaches to prevention.
That includes people moving into stable homes, people supported into work, and people receiving help earlier – preventing homelessness from ever becoming part of their lives.
The Festival of Homewards creates space for partners to pause and reflect on that progress, to reconnect across systems, and to focus on what is needed to sustain prevention work over the long term.
Each event brings together councils, charities, businesses, community organisations and people with lived experience, recognising that prevention only works when systems are aligned locally.
Lambeth host first community-led event
Lambeth hosted the first event of the series with an evening shaped by the local community.
Partners, practitioners and people with lived experience came together to focus on prevention priorities in the borough – including work supporting lone parents and families in temporary accommodation – and the role of community‑based hubs in providing earlier, more coordinated support.
Alongside conversation, the event included creative contributions using performance and poetry to reflect experiences and open up a discussion about what effective prevention looks like on a local level.
For Lambeth partners, the evening was an opportunity to take stock of progress so far and to focus on what needs to happen next as Homewards enters its third year.
While each local event will look different, they are all grounded in the same approach: strengthening local systems so that people receive the right support earlier.
Across the remaining events, partners will focus on spotlighting and reflecting on prevention work tailored to their local contexts.
Learning from these events will inform the remaining years of the Homewards programme and help shape how effective prevention approaches can be strengthened and shared.
As Homewards moves into its next phase, the festival is a moment to recognise what has been achieved – and to keep attention firmly on what still needs to change.
Dr Lade Smith CBE, Member of the Homewards National Expert Panel for the Royal Foundation and President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, reflected on the importance of this collaboration: “What Homewards has done in a really good way is bringing together all these different agencies, who frankly, never usually get into the same room together. The good news is we all realised that we all have the same issue. We all have the same aim.”
Events in the remaining locations will take place over the coming weeks, as the programme looks ahead to the final two years of its five-year mission to demonstrate that it is possible to prevent homelessness, making it rare, brief and unrepeated.
