Making sense of building models of integration - thoughts thus far

I am well into my study tour now having spent time in London, Glasgow, Brussels, Washington, New York and now Boston and there have been consistent messages from all locations. These messages include:

- the need for high level mandate, whether that is legislation or Prime Minister/Presidential leadership to drive service delivery reform and force a range of agencies to think about their practice and responsibility in ending homelessness.

- the importance of leadership at the highest level within government departments seeing that ending homelessness is part of their business, which relates back to the previous point. All people i have interviewed identified the importance of those leaders respecting each other enough to engage in frank discussions to work out more effective ways of collaborating to end homelessness.

- establishing the shared vision and strategy to end homelessness, using models of service delivery that are based on sound evidence and that have been proven to be effective at ending homelessness.

These three points reflect the impact of the many years that these countries have had national homelessness strategies in place, supported a the highest level in government to make a real difference for some of the most vulnerable members of each community.

Whilst everyone that I have interviewed thus far identified real challenges in getting the systems in place to wrap around reach client, the fact that all agencies had a responsibility to do this was never in question from either the NGO side or government side of the business of ending homelessness.

The importance of research to support the development of evidence based practice was reinforced in every meeting that I had and really got me thinking about how important it is going to be to enhance the capture of our Australian experience as we progress down the path of ending homelessness. Understanding the context that the Australian experience has on these international models will be important to understand and further explore.

So, whilst there is no quick and easy fix to get all the services needed to end homelessness collaborating and working in an integrated fashion, I am heartened by what I am thinking of as the "impact of many years of national homelessness strategy" that clearly identifies and places responsibilities on many agencies to partner, collaborate and deliver stronger models of service delivery that focus on ending homelessness.