The Single Homeless Accommodation Project, or SHAP,  has been receiving praise from all sides for its work in Kirklees. The Government Office for Yorkshire and the Humber recently singled SHAP out as a model of good practice for combating social exclusion. So what’s all the fuss about? 

When SHAP was established in 1991, it out started out with a three-year Health Department grant of around £115,000 per year. It had six staff: a manager, three support workers and two members of staff covering housing management, finance and administration and could support around thirty young people, most of whom were referrals. Just over ten years later, SHAP has an annual turnover of £1.25 million, twenty two staff and supports about 130 people at a time in tenancies with 160 young people accessing their voational guidance and education support services in the past eighteen months.. While its financial growth may be impressive, its growing reputation with young people is even more so: over eighty percent of SHAP’s clients are now self-referrals. That’s quite an achievement.

However, while Director Helen Minett is proud of the organisation’s achievements, she is keen to keep our discussion focused on what SHAP is doing to improve itself rather than on what it has done well in the past. “We are developing an Asian women’s service, as young Asian women have asked for one.  We’re also opening more in the evenings as a lot of our users find that suits them better.” This quest for improvement and the direct involvement of young people in developing services has been the story of SHAP ever since it was set up by CHAS over a decade ago.

We’re not soft

SHAP remains a fiercely local and independent organisation with a strong ethos of staff and user accountability and involvement.  However, despite all the involvement, Helen is keen to point out that they’re no soft touch, “We’ve a very good reputation amongst young people in Kirklees, but we’re not soft. They know what to expect!”

What young people can expect is commitment from the staff: “We’ve a very strong ethos here. We don’t ever take the situation out of young people’s hands. We’re all committed to improving the lives of young people with them, not for them. This commitment is deminatrated directly in the way our Support staff work with young people but is also evident throughout the organisation’s staff team.”

Even SHAP’s new offices, to be occupied in September, have had a significant input from young people, from the mural up the stairwell to the disabled access consultancy, which was carried out by young disabled people.

The staff also have a great say in what’s going on within the organisation, as Helen explained, “We are a very democratic organisation. Organisational decisions are made at staff/team meetings and fed into the management committee for discussion and the final decision. Our management committee is not a rubber stamping body but a forum that encourages challenge and debate. This means that the organisation is always responding to what’s happening at the sharp end.”

Services

SHAP has three core services: supported tenancies; supporting young people in their own accommodation and a service specifically geared towards the needs of young pregnant women and single parents. The services aim to provide an holistic mix of support and guidance and to promote the independence of young people. Working across all these projects, three workers are leading on the key issues facing SHAP at the moment: the needs of young black and minority ethnic people, disabled people, those with issues around mental health, and young asylum seekers (after they have gained residence).

Floating Support

Like several other supported housing providers, SHAP has taken the concept of floating support to its logical conclusion: once the period of support comes to an end, the young person keeps their tenancy and SHAP negotiates new tenancies with the local authority or a housing association. The supported tenancies are fully furnished and the young tenant receives intensive support and advice around health, social and life skills and education, training and employment. SHAP offers the same intensity of floating support to young people in their own tenancies.

Outreach

SHAP is now working with the local authority on extending this floating support to council tenancies. Already in partnership with the Council, through the Neighbourhood Renewal programme, SHAP is developing outreach services in estates to improve young people’s access to advice, support and vocational counselling. They are developing proposals with the local authority to provide tenancy inductions, furnished accommodation and housing support for young council tenants. This idea has the full support of the Kirklees Federation of Tenants and Residents Associations (KFTRA), support which SHAP felt was particularly important.

In-Roads

As SHAP developed in the 1990s, it was noticed that many of the tenants were not accessing training and education opportunities. In typical SHAP style, it got together with a range of agencies including Stonham Housing Association, West Yorkshire Youth Association, CHAS and Dewsbury College, and set up the In-Roads Project This provides community based training opportunities through a range of taster courses geared to match young people’s interests. All these courses have solid progression routes into further education and include a range of support and guidance elements . The project has a reputation second to none in the area for attracting and supporting some of the most hard to reach people, the majority having been homeless and some who are dealing with other issues such as problematic drug use. Also accessing Inroads are young epople who had been excluded from school or who left school with absolutely no qualifications.

Funding

All of these activities have led SHAP to pursue a wide range of funding. The usual core income for supported housing providers (rent and transitional housing benefit) could only ever meet a portion of these costs. SHAP has negotiated with landlords, local housing benefits offices  and tenants to allow housing support to take place beyond the usual supported tenancies, but much of SHAP’s work has required alternative sources of income.

SHAP’s list of funders over the past ten years is about as diverse and challenging as it gets: charitable trusts, the lottery, KMC social services, housing benefits, the European Social Fund (ESF), KMC Housing Services private companies, the Housing Corporation and the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) are all included.

Despite SHAP’s extensive experience with income generation, funding is still a thorny issue. SHAP’s diverse sources of income are in part due to volatile and short term nature of much of their funding, and their constant need to replace short term grants. The constant policy changes and government restructuring have also done little to help. For example, SHAP recently lost its ESF funding because of the way the fund was restructured. This meant that there wasn’t enough money left in the pot for them, despite their application being among the most highly rated in the region. Ironically,  and the Government Office for Yorkshire and the Humber (GOYH), who administer ESF in the region, had only recently heralded Inroads as a model of good practice.

However, SHAP are used to hard knocks and have always rebounded from such situations. New funders, including the new Learning and Skills Council and Connexions, are already in their sights.

Supporting People

As you might expect, SHAP have thrown themselves fully into the Supporting People process. SHAP have already negotiated short term funding through Kirklees Social Services who are not entitled to transitional housing benefit because they have gained employment. This, combined with the support they provide across a range of tenancies, puts them in a strong position to take full advantage of the new opportunities Supporting People presents.

Helen Minett is one of three voluntary sector representatives elected onto the Core Strategy Group by the local Inclusive Forum. The Forum has over thirty providers attending regularly, evidence that SHAP has won the respect of organisations within the voluntary sector as well as beyond it.

With Supporting People, the future looks very bright for SHAP. Having grappled with piecemeal bits of funding, for years, there is finally a funding programme that seems made for the kind of work SHAP does.

After more than an hour of discussion with Helen about strategies, partnerships, funders and policies, what shone through most about SHAP was the central role the users have in the whole ethos of the organisation. Helen’s closing point sums that up quite well, “You must mention our football team. It’s a mixed men and women’s team and it came second in the Millennium Volunteers competition. We are very proud of them.”

For further information about SHAP and its services across Huddersfield and Dewsbury, please contact them on 01484 425522.