Richie Andersen is excited and grateful. After years spent suffering substance dependency, relationship breakdowns, health crises and sleeping rough, the Tweed-based grandfather is about to become a mature-aged student.
‘I’m absolutely going in a new direction,’ he agrees emphatically, ‘one of the bonuses of all of this is I’ve now got the option’.
‘All of this’ is the Social Futures Tweed Shire Assertive Outreach Program, launched as a pilot scheme for regional NSW in 2019, with talk last year of a trial to come in the Byron Shire.
A NSW Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) spokesperson last year told The Echo $11 million funding was allocated in the 2023/24 state budget for Specialist Homelessness Services on the Northern Rivers, to be delivered by Social Futures Ltd and Third Sector Australia Ltd, trading as Momentum Collective in the Ballina, Byron, Clarence Valley, Kyogle, Lismore, Richmond Valley and Tweed local government areas.
The department, since renamed Homes NSW, is yet to provide exact figures for program costs in the Tweed and Byron Shire but Mr Andersen agreed to share his experience as an ongoing participant, alongside his Social Futures caseworker, Sacha Zunic, who worked in Sydney’s original version of the project before joining the Tweed team.
From the streets of Tweed to marketing
‘I’ve worked in marketing in the past,’ Mr Andersen says confidently, ‘I’d love to refresh myself and hopefully get the opportunity to maybe get some work here, like some paid real work.’
The once-homeless man says through ‘the likes of’ caseworker Mr Zunic and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), he’s been able to ‘get the tools needed’ to apply for study.
‘Hopefully in the next six weeks, I’ll be starting a course and studying again,’ he says.
The proud smile on Mr Andersen’s face as he sits at a picnic table by the water on a sunny Tweed day is in moving contrast to the portrait painted by his caseworker of a beaten man in the streets less than eighteen months ago.
Bloody and covered in cuts: life on the streets
Mr Zunic says he’d heard of Mr Andersen and was looking for him when he eventually found him one morning as part of regular program street patrols.
‘He’d had a fall out the front of a shop,’ Mr Zunic says, ‘my colleague from the Department of Communities and Justice knew Richie and so we presented ourselves’.
‘His face was bloody, he was covered in cuts,’ Mr Zunic says.
‘We obviously waited for the paramedics to arrive.’
Once Mr Andersen had been taken to hospital for assessment, Mr Zunic says he was able to ‘establish contact’ and importantly, able to get a phone to the rough sleeper.
‘That was the first experience,’ he says of his connection to Mr Andersen.
Fits, fear and the ultimate fall
As for Mr Andersen, he had suffered an epileptic seizure after receiving a diagnosis ten years earlier at Coffs Harbour.
Once working and living in a family home with a partner and children, Mr Andersen says he became his ‘own worst enemy’.
‘I found my way to the streets through substance abuse, being alcohol,’ he says, ’being a little too stubborn for myself, too, which doesn’t help and the lack of money, lack of opportunity, I had basically everything I’d ever had taken from it’.
He says he was ‘absolutely scared to death,’ living on the streets, permanently looking over his shoulder, worried what was going to happen next.
‘Slowly but surely everything I owned got stolen from me,’ he says, ‘because you’re on the street, no one cares’.
‘I had the life beaten out of me, I’ve had all sorts of things happened to me on the street, believe me, it’s an extremely frightening, horrible way to live.’
But his fall in the Tweed Shire and subsequent meeting with Mr Zunich proved a turning point.
90% of program participants securely housed, says charity
The Assertive Outreach Program works as the title suggests, in that it allows social workers to meet rough sleepers ‘in situ,’ Mr Zunic says, ‘rather than having them try to attend services to resolve the issues around their homelessness’.
‘Generally, it involves specialist homelessness services, there’s the Department of Communities and Justice involved, as well as the NSW Department of Health’.
‘We work collaboratively to first engage with people who are long-term rough sleepers, we have to locate them when we’re on patrol,’ Mr Zunic says.
‘So we go out three days a week to identify hotspots.
‘These hotspots are identified to us by members of the community, by the local council, by the police, rangers [all] identify where there are people sleeping rough’.
Specialised workers in areas such as mental health and substance use then head for the hotspots, as Mr Zunic was doing when he found Mr Andersen.
The team of three fulltime staff works with around seventy participants each year, he says, with organisers citing 150 participants so far in the Tweed Shire and around a quarter being First Nations peoples.
They also boast success rates in terms of transitioning people into secure housing of around 90%, earning the program a Premier’s Award last year.
But the program is only funded to last until the end of the 2024 financial year in June and there are extra challenges for the Tweed Shire program compared to the one in Sydney, Mr Zunic says.
Tweed housing wait times triple Sydney’s, says social worker
‘One of the things that I’ve found has been impactful up here is not just the lack of available stock, there’s also been natural disasters, obviously,’ Mr Zunic says.
‘The floods that occurred up here have really impacted the amount of people that were experiencing, that are experiencing, homelessness,’ he says.
Sydney has ‘a much more established public transport infrastructure system’, Mr Zunic says, ‘so people are willing to be housed maybe a little bit outside of their community, knowing that they can reconnect to that community by public transport quite easily, whereas up here, those options aren’t available’.
Wait times for long-term housing are longer in the Tweed Shire, he says.
‘In Sydney, we were getting outcomes on average, I would say, within two to three months and here, it’s probably double that, maybe triple the wait times, often, sometimes even longer, just to find the appropriate property for people,’ he says.
But the caseworker disagrees investing money in more housing rather than programs like the outreach one is the answer.
‘I think that there’s a need for both to sit alongside each other,’ Mr Zunich says.
Housing ‘definitely what we need’ says homelessness social worker
‘The ability to work constructively in the community for people who have been longtime rough sleepers is really challenging,’ he says, ‘so requires a specialised workforce and a specialised program to get people from that space into long-term housing and to make the tenancy stay viable’.
‘We provide the options, the psychoeducation, the capacity building, to allow people to move from rough living to long-term property,’ he says.
‘Look, the biggest problem that we have is a lack of housing.
‘That’s a lack of affordable housing, and it’s a lack of social housing, it’s a lack of community housing, so housing is definitely what we need.’
Program organisers says the proportion of social housing to other housing on the Northern Rivers is 30-50% lower than in Sydney.
The capacity building Mr Zunic refers to is evident in the project data shared by organisers but is palpable in the gratitude Mr Andersen expresses.
Tweed grandfather proof of government funded ‘capacity building’
‘You helped me achieve a couple of things,’ Mr Andersen tells Mr Zunic, ‘helped me get some clothing together, helped me sort of try and find myself and remove myself from my alcohol abuse’.
‘I found him a person I could be completely confidant in,’ Mr Andersen continues, ‘whenever something went wrong, I would drink and such, he’s my contact and absolute gem in that respect’.
Mr Zunic is clearly moved and takes a moment to compose himself before responding.
‘I’m blown away,’ he says, ‘and I’m genuinely thankful, Richie, I feel the same’.
‘You’ve done most of the work yourself, mate, I’ve just kind of stood in the background and, you know, supported you a little bit, but I think most of it’s come from you,’ he says.
‘But it’s really lovely to hear that. Thank you.’
A Social Futures spokesperson said the organisation was unable to provide specific funding figures owing to the charity’s government contract.
The Echo asked NSW Minister for Housing, also the Minister for Homeless, Rose Jackson, how much has been allocated to the Tweed program since 2019, how much the Byron Shire program is expected to receive and when it is due to start but didn’t receive a response by deadline.
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