A night shelter for trans people struggles to find funding

Inside Housing is getting a tour from Carla Ecola, managing director of The Outside Project, which also runs the London LGBTIQ+ Centre, an LGBTQ+ homeless shelter, an LGBTQ+ domestic abuse refuge, and outreach services. It is one of the few service providers specifically set up for trans people experiencing homelessness.

Carla points out their favourite placard, which reads: “Trans rights!!! Get your trans rights here!!!!”

They explain: “The idea is that when people walk in, it’s not like a clinical white cube space. It’s like, not necessarily walking in the Trans Pride march, but that kind of vibe.”

Inside Housing has been invited to see the shelter as volunteers and The Outside Project’s small staff team get ready to welcome the first residents.

As we have reported before, there are significant gaps in data in the UK about how many trans people are experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Under Theresa May, the Conservative government commissioned research into lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people’s experiences of homelessness. But the department failed to publish the findings – they were released this September (three prime ministers later).

Among the findings? There’s no conclusive evidence about how many homeless people in the UK are LGBTQ+, but there is enough evidence to say “the housing needs of LGBT homeless people are not being met fully by housing and support services”.

The report also highlighted international evidence that trans people are unable to access mainstream homelessness shelters, or at risk of being unable to. “It’s not somewhere that a lot of members of our community would feel safe or comfortable to go to,” Carla says.

Many shelters only accept people who are verified as rough sleepers by an outreach worker, which is another barrier. “If you’re a member of our community, you’re more likely to be hidden homeless,” Carla says.

The Outside Project is one of the only services out there for the trans community, and, Carla believes, the only service providing crisis accommodation. The organisation’s first winter night shelter started in 2017, and was on a tour bus in a car park.

“We would have always preferred to have been in a building,” Carla says – but none were available. “The only alternative, really, was to get that tour bus. And we made the best of it. And every bunk was filled every night.”

Carla lived on the bus with the guests. “And it’s not something that I’d do again, but for someone who was just staying there for a few nights, I think most people were just really happy to be around other queer people. And they felt safe. Those were the things that they cared about.”

The next year, the shelter operated out of a community centre. But the space was only available at night, so guests had to pack their things and take them with them during the day, then come back at night. “It was just a huge amount of work, and made everything feel a lot more temporary,” Carla says.

Next, the shelter operated from an old fire station, by now receiving £50,000 of funding from the London mayor’s office, split between The Outside Project and Stonewall Housing (the mayor’s office has in the years since begun to fully fund the project’s year-round LGBTQ+ shelter).

“We used the fire engine bays as our first LGBTIQ+ centre, and that’s where we started doing the day programme, having well-being groups and services come in,” Carla explains. This included artists, the Museum of Homelessness, and asylum charity African Rainbow Family.

During COVID, the centre had to shut but guests and residents could spread out across the building – keeping a safe distance and using the resources of the centre, until guests (and Carla) moved into a COVID hotel.

This was, Carla remembers, “horrible”. “We’d not really experienced the isolation of the pandemic until we moved into the COVID hotel,” Carla says.

The community centre moved into a permanent home in north London, while its domestic abuse refuge is now in south London, and an outreach team is based in Westminster.

The Outside Project got an additional £60,000 in funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government for hotel-based emergency shelter accommodation, although that funding has now come to an end.

And that brings us to this year, and this building in Hackney. The Outside Project has been given access to it by the housing association owner, which plans to develop the site in future, as a free “meanwhile space”. The housing association is also providing security.

In recent times, the building has been squatted and had security guardians living in it. Community volunteers are hard at work on the day of Inside Housing’s visit to try to clean up and make the place more homely.

As we talk, staff and volunteers continue this work: The Outside Project was able to come in and start work a couple of weeks ago, and in that time the walls have been painted and the carpets cleaned to a respectable blue (they were brown with dirt).

Beds are being made ready – some in individual rooms, some in shared ones. More needs to be done: community volunteers are going to install a cooker and a washing machine.

These volunteers are largely from the trans community.

Even if the official statistics aren’t available to calculate the level of need for services like this shelter, The Outside Project isn’t in any doubt.

“It will be full from the minute we open until the minute we close,” Carla says. Guests will come from The Outside Project’s outreach activities – but Carla says they are reluctant to set up a waiting list. It would help to demonstrate to funders the level of demand, but it also comes with real downsides.

During the height of the pandemic, The Outside Project did open for referrals – and received more than 100 for nine bed spaces. “You end up with the majority of people that have been referred to the project never getting a space,” Carla says. “And that creates conflict between us and the community, because they will always be like, ‘I was referred to The Outside Project and they did not give me space.’”

“We can’t send people out shaking buckets in the street for a trans winter night shelter, they’d be at risk of attack”

Many trans people are reluctant to approach mainstream services, because of safety fears about how they will be received. Or, if they do approach a council’s homelessness office, for example, they might be unlikely to disclose that they are trans.

“We had a young person who was told by their housing officer that their parents were trying to support them by [encouraging them to go overseas for] conversion therapy. We had to, obviously, advocate for this young person. If you redirect people to [go back to] their parents who they are fleeing… you have no idea how dangerous that is,” Carla says.

Mainstream homeless shelters may also not be safe from violence, abuse or discrimination for trans people. This was one of the findings of that belatedly released government report, which flagged: “Participants reported being anxious about approaching or accepting a referral to mainstream homelessness services.”

This was based on harassment and abuse from other service users, as well as insensitive or discriminatory behaviour by staff.

Inside Housing and Homeless Link this week launched a new campaign, Reset Homelessness, to call for a systemic review of funding for providers such as The Outside Project. The organisation is under even more strain than ‘mainstream’ providers. To cover staff costs of the Trans Winter Night Shelter, The Outside Project is applying for grants from trusts and foundations, and crowdfunding: at the time of writing, this had raised just under £15,000.

So how does that compare to the costs of running the shelter? Carla puts that at roughly a few hundred thousand pounds for a few months of operation. “It’s not an amount of money that… you can ever expect the community to pay,” they say.

The Trans Winter Night Shelter faces different problems in fundraising to generalist shelters. “Other winter shelters can just link in with a local church, and the whole congregation will show up to volunteer, and they can just go out shaking buckets in the street. We can’t send people out shaking buckets in the street for a trans winter night shelter, they’d be at risk of attack.”

Instead, The Outside Project is calling for local authorities and central government to fund “specialised services for the trans community”, Carla says.

One model for what the UK could implement can be found in New York: the Ali Forney Center, set up in 2002. It is open 24 hours a day, with a full staff, including a chef, and provides 66 emergency beds. “That’s the dream,” Carla says.