New Homeless Alliance for Adelaide south

Reinventing homelessness prevention

In an effort to deliver better outcomes and prevent homelessness in South Australia, the South Australian government has run a competitive tender of homelessness services in the state under a new structure. It sought responses from alliances of social service organisations to work together to address problems in the homelessness system under a single funding contract for an entire region covering all homeless cohorts. The previous system for the Adelaide City and South region was a series of separate funding agreements across 15 different agencies without a common outcomes framework or formal methods to interconnect between services.

Latitude Network supported the Toward Home Alliance to develop a ground up homelessness strategy and program logic based on prevention. With the team, we identified the wide range of cohorts with differing needs across the homelessness system. We zeroed in on those at risk of entering the homelessness system and identified a way to capture data and shift resources towards preventing entry into the crisis accommodation system. 

The alliance partners developed a professional and mature way of collaborating which provided a strong platform for development of a more ambitious program design. This represents one of the most significant changes to the homelessness system in some years, and provides a pathway for better collaboration, use of data, and continuous improvement with transparent sharing of outcomes between the social sector partners and government. 

​The new outcomes–oriented approach helps to align government and social service organisation interests more directly with client interests.  The achievement of client outcomes and prevention of entry into high cost homelessness services provides benefits for all parties.

Congratulations to the alliance partners that will now deliver integrated, outcomes-based homelessness services for the Adelaide City and South region - 

• Aboriginal Community Services
• Baptist Care SA
• Lutheran Care
• Mission Australia
• Sonder
• The Salvation Army

Also see - 

• ​SA Premier's Statement
• Lutheran Care announcement