Ferry Project is pleased to announce that we have been shortlisted for this year’s Homeless Link Successful Partnerships Award 2025 that is part of the Homeless Link Excellence Awards 2025.

The Successful Partnerships Award

This award celebrates organisations within the homelessness sector that can demonstrate exceptional collaboration and partnership initiatives. It acknowledges partnerships that extend beyond traditional boundaries, whether they involve corporate collaborations, partnerships with other public sector entities such as probation or hospitals, or engagement in local strategic alliances. We're interested in hearing about the innovative ways your organisation has formed a partnership to address homelessness; the collaborative efforts undertaken, and the impactful outcomes achieved as a result. We invite you to share how this partnership has contributed to advancing your mission, improving service delivery, and is ultimately making a difference in the lives of those affected by homelessness.

What Ferry Project has been doing

Over the last 3 years we have been working with a number of partners from the health sector. This work has had significant benefits for our clients and the local health services. The most important statistics are that 3 years ago

• 51% of our clients were registered with a doctor when they left our service (due to surgeries not wanting to take them on) now it is 98%
• 44% of our clients felt they were more in control of their physical and mental health when they left the service than when they arrived now it is 65%.

This is despite the needs of our clients getting more complex.

The work has been very challenging as we have supported clients in the last months of their lives, helped people with significant mental health problems access treatment, enable clients to stop smoking, stood by people as they are tested in hospital, fought for clients who were not receiving the help they needed and supported clients through life changing operations.

This work was developed as a direct result of feedback from the homeless people who use our services, people with lived experience of our services, the local community and local agencies who interact with out clients and parts of the health service.

The whole organisation has been involved in the development from the trustees to the front-line staff delivering the project. As a result of the partnership, we have changed the way we work both with our clients and health professionals.

The partnership includes the local authority, public health, the local mental health trust, the local Integrated Care board, the local GP surgery, the local voluntary sector health network and other health agencies.

As a result of the partnership the voice of the Homelessness sector is now heard at a range of levels including

The integrated network level.

The ICB level as we have a representative on the North Care Partnership Board.

The Voluntary Sector Health Network Strategic partnership.

This means that clients views are taken into account in each of these boards and as a result more services have been placed in the community rather than hospitals, consultants have reviewed how homeless people are treated for appointments and Wisbech is involved in a 2-year national pilot where Health Navigators have been employed to support homeless people to access health services. This project is being evaluated by Anglia Ruskin University and if successful will be rolled out at a national level.

The partnership we have been involved in has been created with client input, it has had significant impact on the lives of the clients we support. It has had impact on services to homeless people both locally and regionally and now has the potential to impact services to homeless people at a national level. We want to share the story with other homelessness services so that they can engage with health organisations and their clients receive the same benefits as ours.

The Awards

The Homeless Link Excellence Awards will announce winners in each category at their Summer Conference from 2nd to 3rd June.