A Homeless Support Worker Provider’s Social Enterprise

 

As a 25-year-long service provider to those in need of a homeless support worker, AGS Support has always been involved in preventing homelessness. But since 2019, we decided to take a deeper dive.

Every year, our social enterprise scheme selects at least one homeless resident to support them in a full 360 degrees. We help them with skill training, funding, and employment opportunities to give them a complete footing back into the mainstream.

Taking people from homelessness to independence is, without doubt, one of the greatest aspirations of Supported Housing providers. Our hope is that with an entrepreneurial mindset, we can do a little part to create the social impact we envision.

 

What is a Social Enterprise Scheme?

“So what I saw from my experience was…if we ran charities like businesses, they would be much more successful”. 

These words from Mohnish Pabrai — a big-time investor & founder of Dakshana Foundation — have a powerful message.

With the purpose to make a profit, a business focuses on getting the highest return on capital & remaining efficient. The golden standard is: maximise profitable outcomes.

When a charity is run to maximise social impact, the positive results can be extremely significant. That is the heart of Social Enterprise Schemes: using entrepreneurship skills for public service.

 

Giving A Leg Up To Homeless People

What makes AGS Support stand out, is how perfectly suited its staffing services are to the industry. And it wasn’t an accident. Our services were honed from a decades-long, grass-root understanding of what exactly Supported Housing providers needed.

And it’s with this practicality that we also approach our Social Enterprise Scheme.

As always, it begins with a collaboration. Working alongside local authorities, housing associations, and charities, we identify and mutually agree on a resident in their accommodation to sponsor.

From there, we begin by providing core support like employment opportunities. We also provide important bits and pieces (like references) that most of us take for granted.

 

Helping Them Through Training

When people have real skills that fit job descriptions, employment opportunities become a matter of time.

The training we provide the selected resident with is the same training we give to our own staffing team. It’s exclusive, extensive, and does more than equip them with high-quality support worker skills.

It grows their confidence, gets them into a routine, and gives them direct experience of working within a highly competent team. Right after that, we go onto the next step of our scheme: employment opportunities.

 

Providing Employment & Funding

While AGS Support specialises in support staffing services, the different roles with our company are truly diverse. They can range from frontline daytime concierge to waking night housing officers, emergency support workers, and everything in between.

After completing training with us, the selected resident then gets an exciting opportunity for part time or full time employment.

Alongside paid support worker work with us, thoughtful funding is another key part of our social enterprise scheme.

We take the chosen resident out of homelessness accommodation and into the private rented sector. We give them references, cover their deposits, and pay for the first month of their rent.

This step alone is often one of the biggest obstacles for individuals wanting to get back to their own feet. By removing this barrier, the resident will have a place of their own and have one month of earnings to keep aside.

 

The Social Cost of Homelessness

For those outside the Supported Housing environment, homelessness can seem like an invisible problem. But the few rough sleepers we see are just the smallest fraction of the real homeless —who are estimated to cost the government £20-30,000 annually.

But it’s not just a matter of high support costs. Homelessness is a cost to the healthcare system and a loss of social & human capital.

Through efforts like our Social Enterprise Scheme, we hope to reduce homelessness in a practical, pragmatic way.

Giving a structure of skill-learning, employment, and private renting takes residents out of being ‘service users’. Instead, they can re-discover their aspirations and the initiative to get back to a life of independence.