Threshold fund the purchase and development of a new specialist supported accommodation for highly vulnerable women

Threshold is funding the development of a building designed with the express purpose of accommodating homeless women.

Homeless charity Threshold has purchased a new property to accommodate homeless women who sleep rough and engage in sex working in Swindon. This latest project will support women whose complex health conditions, substance dependence, mental health support needs and other vulnerabilities have caused them to face enormous obstacles in finding and sustaining accommodation as well as accessing fully coordinated care pathways.

Threshold’s chief executive, Michael Keenan, stated: “This project house is unique in that it is the first of its kind in Swindon, established to address the needs of homeless women, with multiple identified vulnerabilities, who desperately seek to exit rough sleeping and engage with medical and psychological treatments that address the physical and emotional trauma they have been subjected to and experienced in profoundly impactful ways. If left untreated, ill health and trauma will typically entrench these individuals in a downward cycle of misery and suffering which can be so difficult to transcend. We are further developing move-on and rehabilitation retreat facilities with partners, that will be available to all Threshold service users, to support emotional recovery and freedom from dependence on illicit substances or alcohol”.

Michael continued, saying that: “Threshold will actively address, through this and associated projects we are developing, the enormous rise over the past two years in the numbers of homeless women entering or remaining in sex work and significantly reduce the duration of time that these women spend sleeping rough. Through our Outreach work, which extends across the week and takes place at varied times, day and night, we will also seek to add further support services to the work we have been doing for years to assist vulnerable women who are sex working. For Threshold, it was imperative to launch this initiative as the project is essential to our goal to try and prevent further deaths and further misery on so many levels for these women”.

"Around the UK various similar projects, usually in partnership with or otherwise supported by Police, have sprung up in recent years with the aim of helping to tackle the complex and anti-social behavioural issues created by street-based sex working while supporting those, predominately, women who are engaged in it. Jason Biggs, project lead at Threshold, stated that “In initiating this project we have consulted key agencies but not collaborated with all. The reason for that is quite simple, it is important to us to align our organisation with agencies committed to transparent and highly ethical practices and who we feel are best capable of supporting those needs the women tell us they have, as well as those needs we identify through assessment in a professional context, without compromising our evidence based practices or respect for a woman’s capacity for self-determination in order to conform with political agendas we cannot fully support. First and foremost, we are concerned to house the vulnerable and provide them the specialist support they require for which our great staff will also be working closely with some very accomplished academics, health professionals and outstanding organisations”.

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