Seeing, Sharing and Supporting: Assertive Outreach as a Partial Solution to Rough Sleeping

Assertive outreach is becoming an increasingly salient feature of policy responses to homelessness—and particularly rough sleeping—with the aim of supporting people to access secure housing. Despite its demonstrated successes, existing research points to structural challenges practitioners face in navigating complex and fragmented service systems to provide people sleeping rough with a continuum of care. This study examines an Australian organisation’s efforts to collaboratively and systematically overcome these challenges by bringing together government, community and service practitioners from multiple sectors in their delivery of an assertive outreach programme. Using an ethnographic research design, this article draws on observations of outreach practices and service provider administrative quantitative data, as well as qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted with assertive outreach service providers. Our findings demonstrate that through flexible and collaborative social work practices, practitioners were able to see people sleeping rough, share information across services and support people into a range of housing, health and other forms of services. Critically, however, structural barriers such as a lack of affordable and social housing prevented assertive outreach from ending people’s homelessness. We foreground the critical implications of these findings for social work. People who sleep rough are widely recognised to be at the extreme vulnerable end of the homeless population, yet mainstream services and models of housing are understood to be inaccessible for these individuals. In a number of countries, including the UK, the USA and Australia, assertive outreach is a broad model that aims to overcome the barriers to service engagement experienced by people sleeping rough and, ultimately, permanently end their homelessness. We conducted a study in a major Australian capacity city to understand how assertive outreach operated in practice, and how it sat within the broader housing, health and welfare system. The research identified two important implications for social work. First, social work has a critical role to play in identifying barriers to service access amongst marginalised groups and disrupting those barriers through service innovation. Secondly, for homelessness broadly, and rough sleeping in particular, social work has an opportunity to lead societal reform to increase the supply of affordable housing. A sufficient supply of af