Homeless Hackathon at Housing 2019

Last week MOBIE, FutureGov and Inside Housing held a Homeless Hackathon at Housing 2019, Europe’s largest housing festival. Participants designed new, innovative solutions to help put an end to homelessness. Over 120 people took part generating 17 amazing ideas. Voting took place during the conference and the winners were announced by David Walker, Bishop of Manchester. The winning ideas were:

1. Virtual address lockers and service to recover lost ID and get a bank account – the lack of both are a major block to getting back into housing;

2. ‘It could be me’ awareness campaign – a national targeted publicity campaign to raise awareness of how it is easy to fall into homelessness - the campaign will provide tips on how to avoid homelessness for those who are approaching it from those who have experienced it.

An organisation has indicated a strong interest in piloting the lockers idea and we want to ensure that the second idea is also taken forward. Well done to the winning teams and a huge thanks to all who took part, including students from MOBIE's Advance Home Futures MSc at Teesside University. They all gave so much energy and came up with some great ideas to address this major problem.

If you’re looking for further reading, there’s a newsletter summarising the Homeless Hackathon here and a great article published here.

Find out more about enrolling on a MOBIE course on our courses page here