This year, we hit a milestone three decades in the making: 300 bedrooms delivered for young Australians experiencing homelessness across the eastern seaboard.
It’s a number we don’t take lightly. Each one of those bedrooms is a safe place to sleep, a foundation from which a young person can focus on school or work, build relationships, and begin to imagine a future. None of them would exist without the generosity, commitment and collaboration of our industry — our donors, partners and volunteers who have shared our vision since we began in 1996.
“A home is more than four walls and a roof. It’s the foundation for an ordinary life,” says Kate Mills, our CEO. “Thirty years ago, a group of senior leaders from across the property industry came together with a simple but powerful idea: what if we worked together, rather than alone, to help end youth homelessness? That idea became the Property Industry Foundation.”
Over the past financial year, 588 young people found safety in our Haven Houses and the programs we support, with 109,500 safe sleeps recorded over 12 months. We delivered 32 new bedrooms across six Haven Project initiatives, including Haven House Shepparton (The Nest) in Victoria, giving young mothers up to five years of supported independent living; Haven House Logan (Jinndii Waijung) in Queensland, offering nine bedrooms for vulnerable young mothers including those escaping domestic and family violence; and Haven House Inner West in Sydney, a refurbished seven-bedroom crisis refuge for young women.
Our industry’s support totalled more than $6.4 million this year in donations, event fundraising and in-kind goods and services, alongside 4,921 hours of volunteering from 425 people across 41 working bees. Independent analysis shows every dollar donated to us generates $3.70 in social value.
But our work is far from finished. Tonight, more than 46,000 young Australians will go to sleep without a safe, stable place to call home. Homelessness among 19 to 24-year-olds has risen faster than any other age group over the past 15 years, and more than one in three young people leaving the care system will experience homelessness as they transition into adulthood.
“Every bedroom matters,” says Kate Mills. “Every project we deliver provides much more than accommodation. It creates stability, dignity and opportunity.”
That’s why we’re not stopping at 300. We’re aiming to deliver a further 300 bedrooms over the next five years, backed by our largest project to date — the 19-bedroom Haven House South Dowling — and a pipeline of more than 80 bedrooms already in construction or planning.
