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YP4 – Joining up services for Homeless jobseekers

Introduction to YP4

YP4 is ambitious: At its core, it is about service integration. YP4 is a three-year trial, which seeks to demonstrate that joining up programs and services in a client-centred manner will result in more sustainable employment and housing outcomes for young homeless jobseekers.

YP4 is what may be termed a bottom up initiative: It was originally the idea of Hanover Welfare Services, and its current form is the result of about three years worth of research and developmental work on the part of the four key partner organisations responsible for delivering it. These organisations are leading not for profit organisations in Victoria: Hanover Welfare Services, Melbourne Citymission, the Brotherhood of St Laurence and Loddon Mallee Housing Services.

Earlier, YP4 was known as the Young Homeless Jobseeker Trial. The new name is intended to capture the trial's purpose using language with less pejorative connations. YP represents young people. The four is in hyperscript, signifying to the power of four. The four p's or powers are purpose - meaning a job, place - meaning a home, personal support to denote the service being offered, and proof to acknowledge YP4's status as a trial and to convey the importance of the evaluation framework underpinning YP4.

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In Australia, about 80,000 young people experience homelessness and unemployment each year. The outcomes of public assistance to these people are unsatisfactory. Public assistance seems to be a step behind the requirements of a contemporary, ever-changing population, and it is plagued by oppressive and inflexible business rules and fragmentation. YP4 represents a new paradigm for assisting individuals who experience both homelessness and unemployment, in recognition that existing forms of housing and employment assistance are linear, ineffective and inefficient for homeless jobseekers1. YP4 offers homeless jobseekers a single and consistent point of contact to address employment, housing, educational and personal support goals in an integrated manner over a two-year period.

YP4 is working with 240 participants over four sites, covering inner metropolitan, outer suburban and regional areas. YP4 participants are very disadvantaged: they are in the first third of their working life (aged 18 to 35 years), they are currently homeless or have a history of homelessness and they are looking for work, although they may be deemed not to be 'work ready' as yet.

In the interests of testing replicability and maximising use of local expertise, each of the trial partners has sought a slightly different focus.

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There are six principles that underpin YP4. First, housing, employment and personal support must be interlocked and delivered as an integrated package of assistance. Second, the integration of housing, employment and personal support assistance must happen at every level, not just at the level of casework but also at systemic and structural levels. Third, sustainable employment is understood as the over-arching goal, which must determine the way that other forms of support are provided. Fourth, it is relationships, and not transactions, that count. Fifth, solutions must be locally specific, and joined up locally too, and sixth, coordinated case management is the key and it must be well resourced enough to ensure individualised, timely and flexible responses.

It follows that the key components of the YP4 service model are:

This may not sound like anything new. The idea of coordinating and integrating services for disadvantaged people is widely regarded as a good thing and for years, professional case managers have been client-centred, flexible, outcome oriented and eager to work in a holistic way. Community agencies, too, are keen to work in partnership with others and inter-agency agreements abound. Individual practitioners and community agencies which try to implement integrated practice on a wider scale encounter a range of systemic barriers - including structural and cultural barriers, which are extraordinarily difficult to overcome. For example, professional casework takes place in the context of a set of program parameters, which are often narrowly defined and sometimes serve to prevent those who may be inclined to see and solve problems that exist outside those parameters from doing so. YP4 is aware of the range of barriers to coordinated service provision and joined up practice and remains committed not just to tinkering around the edges, and seeing what practitioners and service managers can do differently, but rather to challenging the structural, cultural and other barriers in ways that can potentially lead to real change.

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STEVE'S STORY

Last year looked good for Steve: He had a good flat in a good area and he had started an apprenticeship in the building industry. But he could not manage his rent on apprenticeship wages, he fell behind and got evicted and when homeless, he could not continue with his job. Steve has since found himself a place in a boarding house in North Melbourne for which he pays $120 a week. It is neither cheap nor appropriate. He is keen to find a new home in the area. And ideally, he would like to go back to his apprenticeship. Such a job would likely put around $200 a week in his pocket which, Steve figures, won't be enough to get decent accommodation anywhere near North Melbourne. Steve is now tossing up whether to hold out for a better-paying job - a risky move given his low education - or move somewhere cheaper which is further away from his friends and his job opportunities. It is appalling that young people like Steve need to make such hard choices that essentially trade off housing against work and education.



To this end, the YP4 case managers face a tall order: They are asked to transcend the program boundaries that the rest of us have been professionalised to look for to help us feel safe and to help give our work meaning. They are asked to tolerate a high level of uncertainty about the boundaries of their work, the business rules of this work, the resources at their disposal and the like. Further, they are asked to tolerate this uncertainty on an ongoing basis. To explain, YP4 case managers work in an environment where the commitment to joined up practice is operationalised everywhere they look. Nothing is off limits, it seems. YP4 is about joining up at every level, not just on the ground where direct practice occurs. YP4 is riding the interface between policy, interdepartmental relationships and direct service practice in order to more comprehensively assist young homeless job seekers to make the transition to independence.

Conceptually, YP4 is new. Succinctly conveying what it means to other people is a difficult challenge. It is not a concrete program or service and does not accord with normal expectations and community understanding about how programs and services exist and operate. Its flexible nature, its model-like qualities (as distinct from program-like qualities), and its fluidity make it difficult to describe and pin down. The risk of being misunderstood is omnipresent.

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These difficulties notwithstanding, the paradigm shift embodied by YP4 seems to have been understood by many in public life, as YP4 has attracted considerable support from many different government departments, peak bodies and community organisations. YP4's supporters include (but are not limited to):

The partner agencies and many of their supporters believe that YP4 has the potential to profoundly influence social program provision in the future, especially the design of housing and employment assistance.


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