Midland Heart: 2006 Gold Award winner
About Midland Heart
Midland Heart (previously known as Prime Focus) successfully runs a multiple needs unit for excluded men, creats 140 private tenancies a year for people in temporary accommodation, and runs a housing advice centre and recruitment agency for homeless people.
The organisation has tackled the complex issues of homelessness since Shelter's first campaigns in the mid-1960s, developing preventative and responsive services for some of the most vulnerable and excluded people in the Midlands. A housing assocation that has developed into a social investment agency, it has more than 14,000 homes and works with local authorities and strategic partners, among them Irish Welfare, Birmingham Drugline, Anawin Women's Projcect and Prison Link.
The award-winning projects
Since it opened a Multiple Needs Unit for excluded men in 2000, it has helped reduced rough sleepers on Birmingham’s streets to single figures. It moves entrenched rough sleepers into permanent accommodation through its First Step scheme and is working on new projects relating to homeless men’s sexual health and post-hostel housing.
The services have been extended and tailored to young people with multiple needs to help them sustain their tenancies and to avoid institutional care and tenancy breakdown. User involvement is encouraged across the organisation through tenant/board members’ customer satisfaction surveys, mystery shopper programmes, tenant conferences and participation days. Care and support residents benchmark the organisation’s schemes.
The Midlands Homeless Services Centre operates a housing advice service, coordinates a rough sleepers outreach service, tenancy support, services for refugees/asylum seekers, accommodation-related support to people with drug misuse problems and support to young people with multiple needs.
A specialist recruitment agency, Focus Pathways, works with homeless people and Fare Share distributes surplus food to those in food poverty. It operates its own social investment fund, redistributing surpluses into community regeneration activities that help prevent homelessness.
What the judges said
“Addressing homelessness is embedded into the whole of the Prime Focus outlook and practice and clearly co-ordinated within the organisation’s framework,” said the judges. “The number of strands in its homelessness work, which is often the fruit of partnerships with others, is exceptional.”
Its “very high physical standards in well-designed and well-maintained buildings with high management standards” was also praised. “The organisation has a comprehensive and realistic risk policy anchored in the belief that everyone can be helped, but unacceptable behaviour needs to be acknowledged and managed.”
The experts’ view
“Prime Focus has a clear overall vision of homelessness,” said the experts. “The Multiple Needs Unit is an excellent example of an organisation meeting the hard-core needs of those who are excluded, and the central structure of the Homeless Service Centre is very positive.”
The youth and Irish projects “demonstrate very high standards of training and additional services”, judges said, “and there is a strong user involvement throughout the services”.
Further information
Visit Midland Heart's website for further information on the organisation.
