On Friday night the Simon Community in Northern Ireland will be taking the plight of the homeless directly to Stormont.
The message is a simple one – more must be done to combat the growing number of people, families and children who are presenting as homeless.
Organisations like the Simon Community do what they can to fill in the cracks, but too many are continuing to fall through, usually through no fault of their own.
Friday night’s One Big Sleep Out in the grounds at Stormont will send a visual signal directly to the doorstep of Parliament Buildings.
The Simon Community chief executive Jim Dennison summed up the housing crisis perfectly. He said it remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of government policy that it can see sense in spending more of its much-needed finance on keeping the legally declared homeless in emergency, temporary accommodation, than it would cost to provide them with adequate housing in the first place.
The number of homeless now matches the population of our second city Derry – 86,000.
The Children’s Commissioner has also recently weighed in on the problem.
Chris Quinn has warned that thousands of families are being let down by a failure to tackle the housing crisis, which has now left more than 5,000 children facing homelessness in Northern Ireland – and that number is rising.
Homeless people cannot just be shuffled out of sight, particularly families with young children.
Any society should be judged on how it looks after its most vulnerable citizens.
And the statistics – 5,105 children being presented as homeless in May this year – show Northern Ireland is being found wanting. The effects on physical and mental health and the emotional fallout can have long-lasting consequences.
What is currently being done to help those in need has landed in the lap of charities.
Not only are they helping those who find themselves without somewhere to live, they are doing what they can with limited and dwindling resources to help prevent families at risk from adding to the statistics. But that those charities are being swamped by the scale of the problem is the clearest signal of a failure of government to address the crisis
Those who find themselves homeless do not do so through choice.
But those with the power to do something about it can ease the burden, should they choose.
If you want to donate to the Simon Community or find out more about their work, go to https://simoncommunity.org/