MORNINGTON Peninsula Shire Council will investigate partnering with Frankston to help tackle homelessness on the peninsula, amid increasing concerns about its social impacts.
At last Tuesday’s council meeting Cr Sarah Race said she knew of cases where children were attending schools on the while living in tents.
“Schools are feeding these children, putting their arms around them and feeding them,” she said.
Race said she was also aware of service widows being forced to live in cars, and cancers sufferers sleeping rough on the foreshore.
She said “outcomes” were good in Frankston, which uses the “by-name list” model through its Frankston City Strategic Housing and Homelessness Alliance and is led by Frankston Council and Launch Housing.
“I believe in collaborative partnerships … we don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” she said.
The by-name list model involved agencies creating lists of names of people who were rough sleeping or homeless and recording and maintaining real-time data to measure progress.
Instead of seeing homelessness as being too hard to tackle, local service systems were brought together to work in a coordinated and specifically local approach.
“If you know who people are, they don’t have to bounce around services,” Race said.
She said the shire council needed to commit to “doing something”.
Race’s unanimously adopted motion called for $70,000 a year to be referred to the budget to implement a model of homelessness, and for more money to be given to community support centres at Hastings, Mornington and Rosebud.
Council will also lobby the state and federal governments for money to implement the model and increase emergency relief on the peninsula.
CEO at Southern Peninsula Community Support Jeremy Maxwell said January – which was usually quieter in terms of the number of clients needing support – had been the busiest in the service’s six-year history.
“We saw a 30 per cent increase just over January, so that doesn’t look good for coming months,” he said.
Maxwell said the by-name list model was a good way to maximise resources and get accurate date on homelessness to improve advocacy.
Getting correct and current data about clients required a structure like the by-name list model because of privacy laws.
“It’s something I’ve been pushing for,” he said.
A report on the model of homelessness will be prepared by April.
First published in the Mornington News – 27 February 2024