The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International license. We'd love for you to share it, so feel free. Images, videos, graphics and logos are not covered by the CC BY license and may not be used without permission from Deakin or the respective copyright holder. For more information on how to share or reuse this content, please contact researchcomms@deakin.edu.au.
To improve homelessness support services, let’s listen to voices from the frontline
Research news
8 October 2025
The Deakin Home Research Centre has partnered with nonprofit organisation Give Where You Live Foundation to evaluate the Geelong-based service providers supporting people experiencing or at risk of homelessness and the issues they face.
In 2023-2024, over 4,800 people sought assistance from the Geelong-based specialist homelessness services. Approximately a third were currently homeless, with the remaining at risk.
Unfortunately, close to two-thirds of people experiencing homelessness don’t seek support from specialist services, so the actual number is likely to be much higher.
Giving voice to those working at the frontline with people experiencing homelessness
With rising costs of living, increasing housing costs and rental stress, demand for homelessness services is overwhelming.
The new report, Home Truths: Local Insights into Homelessness, was developed in consultation with the community and sets out recommendations aligned to five major themes discovered in evaluating the current level of demand and challenges faced by the homelessness services and supports.
Led by Dr David Giles and Dr Akari Nakai Kidd, the research team aimed to answer the question, ‘How can local service providers best meet the needs of people facing homelessness in the City of Greater Geelong?’
On the surface, homelessness appears as the absence of housing. Beneath it lies a story of resilience, structural gaps, and community response. For us, research gives voice to these lived realities, shaping policy, guiding good-design, and reimagining what it means to find home.
Why collaborative and co-designed research is key
The STICKE (Systems Thinking in Community Knowledge Exchange) process is a key part of their collaborative research ethos. It creates the opportunity for those with lived experience of a complex problem to share their knowledge, facilitating deeper dialogue and ensuring the outcome is community grounded.
The project included three co-designed community knowledge-exchange workshops that involved a representative group of key service providers, community leaders and other stakeholders.
The workshops helped to identify gaps and opportunities within the system, establish how services could support those in need (in the ways they wanted to be supported) and determine some of the barriers to implementing solutions.
What do the findings recommend?
The Home Truths report suggested immediate actions and long-term improvements to address the most pressing issues, they include:
- Expanding both social and emergency housing remains the single biggest priority for improving outcomes in the community. Stable, flexible, long-term funding is essential to move beyond short-term crisis responses and build preventive, community-driven solutions.
- More flexible services will build trust, reduce client fatigue and encourage engagement. This could include extending hours, embedding lived-experience staff, and tailoring approaches to each person’s needs.
- Real-time collaboration and data-sharing portals could reduce information silos and give a clear, up-to-date picture of services, vacancies, and needs.
- Prevention and early intervention must sit alongside crisis responses. Housing agents, neighbourhood groups and schools can assist in identifying at-risk tenants and increasing awareness can stop homelessness before it starts.
The research team concluded that while there isn’t a single simple solution, these recommendations can work together holistically to improve the services and supports empowering individuals to exit homelessness.
The problem is a system –the system we all participate in, whether as renters, landlords, care workers, researchers, and so on. And that system fails people. So, we all bear responsibility for remedying it.
‘The next steps are to identify projects that might have immediate benefits – like new information-sharing platforms to help level the playing field slightly for services and clients,’ says Dr Giles.
The research team includes Dr Meg Mundell, Associate Professor Ameeta Jain, Professor Richard Tucker and Dr Anahita Sal Moslehian.