People exiting custody are vulnerable to homelessness, with 1 in 8 accessing homelessness services within a year between 2011 and 2016 – 20 times the rate of the wider population (NSW Department of Communities and Justice’s Family and Community Services Insights Analysis and Research). The same research found that a larger proportion also access legal aid (40%) and/or appear in court (38%) between their custody exit and homelessness service access.
This is where government agencies Homes NSW and Legal Aid NSW come in, working together to remove housing barriers as well as to address and prevent homelessness for vulnerable clients, such as Aboriginal women in custody.
At the 4th National Justice Forum, executive directors Tara Vella and Meredith Osborne will be presenting a case study on strengthening pre-release planning to ensure safer transitions for Aboriginal women in custody. Ahead of the forum, Third Sector sat down with them to give us a glimpse into the work they’re doing.
Tell us more about the work you’re doing as part of your respective organisations.
Tara Vella: I work for Homes NSW, and my area is in housing services. We do the tenancy management support for all public housing tenancies across NSW, which is about 99,000 tenancies. We also assist clients who need housing or assistance from us.
We don’t just provide public housing; we also provide crisis accommodation through temporary accommodation if someone is homeless and has nowhere to stay for the night. We also do a select number of rental product assistance programs to support clients who are eligible for social housing. We don’t have properties available, but we provide subsidies and support to those people to stop them from being homeless.
We have a lot of clients who are vulnerable and require extra support and attention. We operate across NSW and have staff members across the state who support tenants and clients seeking a service from Homes.
Meredith Osborne: I’m the Executive Director of the Civil Law Division at Legal Aid NSW, a government agency that provides a range of legal services to people experiencing disadvantage. We cover many areas of law, such as criminal law, family law and civil law.
We practice in everything from employment law to consumer protection, social security, immigration and housing, our largest area of practice across our businesses statewide now. The work we do in housing involves assisting vulnerable tenants who may be facing eviction for a range of reasons or have issues with social housing. We assist with that when there is a legal issue involved.
We have 25 offices across NSW and are working in metropolitan communities, areas of very concentrated disadvantage, as well as regional and remote communities across the state.
How do you make it easier for Aboriginal women exiting custody to apply for social housing?
Meredith Osborne: The central principle of our project is removing the housing barriers women in custody face upon release. Some of those are legal barriers that require assistance from a solicitor to remove. We address things like debts to support them to get back onto the priority housing waitlist.
Some of the clients we work with have negative classifications. It means they were blacklisted because of past tenancy problems, and that can prevent them from getting back onto the housing list. We work in a very concentrated way, and we intend to reach every single Aboriginal woman in custody in NSW who had a Homes NSW file at some point in their history to identify the barriers and address them together quickly. We do that through a set of agreed principles that we came up with between our agencies.
We have 248 Aboriginal women eligible for the project, about two-thirds (67%) of all Aboriginal women in custody in NSW at present. The outcomes are extraordinary: Most of the women we assisted were approved for housing on the priority waitlist. They had negative classifications removed. Their debts were waived. They had a dorm housing application reactivated. Some participants have already been housed when they’ve been released from custody.
One of the strengths of this project was that lawyers were assisting the women when we got the referrals, and we were able to pick up other legal problem types that participants were experiencing. Not only were we able to address housing barriers jointly, but we also identified whether they had unpaid fines, family law issues, parent protection issues or other legal problems and connect participants with a lawyer who can help.
All these are around supporting those women and setting them up for success upon release. We don’t want the part of the system where women are being released into homelessness or problems that we can address while they’re in custody.
Tara Vella: A lot of these women had dealt with housing before, and their experience may not have been as good as it should have been. Having Legal Aid as the intermediary is great, as it gives them the support they need. It means they don’t have to go through our processes, which can be complex and daunting for some, but we’re trying to get better at simplifying those.
Having Legal Aid support these women made the process more streamlined and way easier. We could explain what we needed and have an intermediary who could then explain it to the women. As a result, it built those women’s trust back with us, which we had lost because maybe they were evicted from a tenancy for different reasons. Having someone else come in to support them and work with us made some good changes and outcomes for these women.
When these women are released from incarceration, they don’t have to face the daunting fact of needing to go to a housing office. When they do, we are already aware of the situation. That’s how we’ve been able to house and support some of these women without them having to go back and forth with us.
Meredith Osborne: We also had fantastic buy-in from Corrective Services NSW, a key partner in this project as well. Most of the referrals into the project came from Corrective staff, who could see the outcomes and are very keen to see the end-to-end pathway for these women.
The genesis of the project was a unit within the Department of Communities and Justice called Transforming Aboriginal Outcomes, which had a very strong commitment to closing the gap and priority reforms to reduce Indigenous incarceration and other reforms for Aboriginal people in Australia.
We also had a lot of senior leadership support from CEOs and executives across our three agencies and a willingness to try something different. Certainly, the outcomes we’ve achieved have demonstrated that. In our view, it was a successful pilot on many levels – not just in terms of the outcomes we were able to achieve for individual women, but also in terms of what we can achieve in a short, focused period when we’ve got shared commitment across agencies.
How do you reduce the current barriers for Aboriginal women in custody who were previous public housing tenants? How do you allow them to keep their tenancy or remain priority-approved whilst in custody?
Tara Vella: When public housing tenants become incarcerated, we secure their homes and reduce their rent to five dollars a week so that they don’t come out of incarceration with big debts and the possibility of getting evicted. Normally, it’s for six months, but depending on whether someone’s going to be out in seven, eight or nine months, we just extend that, so they have somewhere to come back to.
Those who are incarcerated remain on the public housing list anyway. Once we approve them, they’re put on the list. It just means they wouldn’t get an offer till they’re out of jail, but that’s okay.
Meredith Osborne: We’re thinking about how we scale this small pilot and what it might look like if it becomes a business-as-usual way of working because of this pilot. One of the opportunities for future work is in NSW. We’d call it a mixed model, with Homes NSW as the steward of the social housing system in NSW along with community housing providers (CHPs). But this pilot was limited to clients who had a Homes NSW file; it wasn’t focused on women who had been tenants with CHPs.
One of the issues we have at Legal Aid NSW is in the community housing sector, as sometimes their policies are inconsistent. An example would be how long they might keep the housing secure while women are incarcerated, which is often less than six months. That’s an area that we’re all keen to keep working on from the future point where it’s a whole system approach.
Tara Vella: The public housing part is by far the biggest. But we can take the learnings from this and then spread that over to other CHPs as well. When we waive some debts and do some other things, when we look at how much money that was and then compare that to our old practice (where someone would be coming in several times to sort out their application), it was quite cost-effective because this has saved time for our staff. Without the Legal Aid support, we would have clients coming in three, four or five times.
What new approaches to cross-agency collaboration do you implement?
Tara Vella: We just work very closely together. We have some key contacts who meet regularly and work through cases as they come up. And then we have a governance meeting just to check how we’re going. We just make sure that we have the same goal for this program: to support Aboriginal women in custody and make it easier for them to apply for housing. We’re very much together on the goal and work together with the planning, which I find very collegiate and collaborative.
Meredith Osborne: We have shared commitment at senior levels across the three agencies: Tara is the executive sponsor at Homes, I am at Legal Aid, and we have Luke Grant at Corrective as executive sponsor as well. We also have passionate commitment from our CEOs. Having that executive level of commitment keeps the momentum and accountability of the project, and we keep it moving along. The timing is right for cross-agency collaboration because we have that commitment.
On the ground, our frontline staff are so keen. They started to see the outcomes, and all of them just had this shared passion for the work. It was a very concentrated project, and they worked extremely hard to get it done. But across Homes, Legal Aid and Corrective Services, everyone just wanted to make it work.
Is there anything you want to add or highlight?
Tara Vella: It just shows that government agencies can work well together with a shared goal and outcome, break down some of the bureaucratic barriers and come up with a streamlined model that works for all agencies involved and the people we’re trying to assist – in this case, the Aboriginal women in custody. That can be done with a bit of flexibility on how we do our work.
Meredith Osborne: Just have a willingness to be bold and try to do things differently. In the long term, not only are there opportunities for us here to embed this as business as usual and scale it up, but it has also shifted the way we will work together in the future. At Legal Aid, the work we’re doing in civil law often involves clients who have legal issues with other government agencies across the board. We need a very creative way to look at issues at a system level and work together. None of us wants our most disadvantaged and vulnerable citizens to undergo extended legal processes to get problems sorted out.
Learn more about the power of cross-agency collaboration for post-justice outcomes. Register for Justice Forum now.
Geraldine is currently the Content Producer for Third Sector, an Akolade channel. Throughout her career, she has written for various industries and international audiences. Her love for writing extends beyond the corporate world, as she also works as a volunteer writer at her local church. Aside from writing, she is also fond of joining fun runs and watching musicals.
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