Tshwane released the following announcement this morning of their participation as a vanguard city in the Institute of Global Homelessness A Place to Call Home campaign:
The City of Tshwane is joining a global campaign to end street homelessness by 2030. Homelessness is a global challenge, with an estimated 100 million people worldwide living without shelter. The Institute of Global Homelessness at DePaul University, Chicago, is launching a campaign to help 150 cities work toward ending street homelessness by 2030.
The City of Tshwane has now committed itself to be among the first vanguard cities in a global movement to end homelessness.
On the 15th of March 2018 the City of Tshwane is announcing its commitment to join some 10 vanguard cities across all six continents, working with its local partners and the Institute of Global Homelessness toward “A Place to Call Home” for all who are currently living on the streets of our city.
“The City of Tshwane is leading by example and will help other cities around the world to take action to end street homelessness,” said Kat Johnson, director of the Institute of Global Homelessness.
The campaign, A Place to Call Home, will begin with a small group of vanguard cities across all six continents. Each city will commit to achieving a goal by the end of 2020: either an end to street homelessness, a reduction in street homelessness, or a goal specific to a population of people living on the street.
The Institute of Global Homelessness will help these cities as they set goals, strengthen or develop their data collection systems and identify areas of improvement. They will take those findings and share them with other cities, with the ultimate aim of reaching 150 cities who will end street homelessness by 2030. The City of Tshwane, with its key partners, has committed itself to implement a strategy to “advance the social, economic, spatial and political inclusion of street homeless people, thereby ensuring their enhanced and holistic freedoms” (State of the City Address by the Executive Mayor Solly Msimanga, 2016).
In recent years, a social contract was entered into by the City of Tshwane, in partnership with the Tshwane Homelessness Forum, the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa. This contract gave effect to a collaborative research project, titled Pathways out of Homelessness, and a policy and strategy on street homelessness was prepared for adoption by the City.
“There is an emerging global movement to end homelessness, and A Place to Call Home helps cities and countries to work collaboratively to tackle the problem worldwide,” said Johnson.
Homelessness looks different everywhere, and agreeing on definitions of homelessness had slowed down these types of collaborations in the past, explained Johnson. In 2015, the Institute of Global Homelessness released a framework that defines different types of homelessness so that international collaborators can work from the same definition.