Oasis Community Housing - Hope not Homelessness

In this episode we chat to David Smith and Alex Laing from Oasis Community Housing. Oasis is a charity that exists to reignite a hope and provide a future for everyone facing homelessness and like ourselves they believe that anyone’s life can be transformed for the better. That’s why, every year,  Oasis offer hope and futures to people facing homelessness. 

David is the Chief Executive of Oasis whilst Alex is the Project Team Lead for Resettlement. We wanted to speak to Oasis specifically around the fantastic work they are doing within the community and also about the wider impacts the Covid pandemic has had on homelessness and on the charitable sector as a whole.

It was reported in June 2020, by the Guardian and as part of a Pro Bono Economic study conducted that 1 in 10 UK charities were facing bankruptcy as they struggle to cope with a £10bn shortfall caused by soaring demand for their services and lost fundraising income due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

Additionally, homelessness is a notoriously difficult thing to quantify. As elements such as sofa surfing, means people often don’t consider themselves to be homeless. Furthermore, there is no national figure for how many people are homeless across the UK. Crazy isn’t it. But that's because homelessness is recorded differently in each of our nations, and because of this, many homeless don’t even show up in official statistics. 

What we do know is for the last 5 years’ core homelessness has been rising year on year in England, reaching 219,000 before the pandemic with current estimates believed to be in the region of  280,000. 

Homelessness isn’t inevitable. Finland for example are showing the rest of Europe homelessness can decline. But homelessness must be beyond buildings. It’s about people and nurturing supportive relationships that offer hope and futures and not simply a temporary “Everyone in” accommodation . 

Chatting to David and Alex was an absolute pleasure and we really hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did.

Thank you.

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