PIE4shelters: Making shelters Psychologically and Trauma Informed
The PIE4shelters project aims at improving the capacity of homeless services to support women with the experience of homelessness and gender-based violence. The project will develop a training guideline for homeless services, based on the PIE approach. PIE stands for Psychologically Informed Environments .Psychologically-informed services take into account the psychological makeup – the thinking, emotions, personalities and past experience - of service users in the way a service operates (definition PIE link). The PIE4shelters project will also promote a trauma-informed and gender-sensitive way of working.
The main activities and outputs of the project:
- Develop a PIE training framework, target group are homeless services.
- Train frontline and management staff working with homeless services in the partner countries HU, BE, IE, IT, UK
- Organize national awareness raising events on PIE in partner countries, target group are homeless services
Training and awarenes raising events will be available for free. Related information & dates will be published on this website. You can also contact the project officer Ruth Kasper.
PIE4shelters started on the 1st of January 2018 and will run for 2 years. It is co-funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship (REC) program of the European Commission. It is implemented by a consortium comprising homeless and gender-based violence services: BMSZKI- Budapest Methodological Centre of Social Policy (coordinator, HU), CVFE - Collectif contre les Violences Familiales et l’Exclusion (Belgium), FEANTSA (Belgium/EU), Safe Ireland (Ireland), fio.PSD (Italy) and DePaul (UK).
AMIF PROGRAM - Housing program for refugees and people with subsidiary protection status
The Budapest Methodological Social Center and its institutions are committed to assisting homeless, vulnerable people who have lost their self-confidence. To enable us to meet the needs of these people we have placed the development of our services at the core of our professional work. Our search for improvements has culminated in the launch of our new housing program: "Promoting independent housing for the beneficiaries of international protection". (2016-2018)
The goal of the program
The goal of our new program is to help refugees and people with subsidiary protection status to make a new start in life and live independently.
Our institution has provided housing support for homeless people for over 10 years and, based on this experience, we have developed our current program, which provides:
- financial support for a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 12 months;
- case management and housing counseling; and
- after the end of the financial support 6 months of aftercare service for the refugee or person with subsidiary protection.
In the program some of the primary tasks of the social workers are: helping with finding an independent and safe housing solution, contacting the landlords, concluding rental contract, dealing with housing-related duties, general office administration tasks, helping with the job search, getting access to and ensuring participation in a Hungarian language course, enrolling children in schools.
To help our clients to overcome the trauma caused by war, persecution and the loss of their home – where needed – we offer the services of a psychologist.
One of the most important elements of integration into society is work and – associated with it – having their own income. Our colleagues have many years of experience in job seeking for poorly educated, homeless people who often have a variety of health problems. With this experience, they can provide efficient support for our clients, which helps them to find a job more easily and to have enough income to live independently. Where needed, an interpreter can help make the communication between the client and the social workers more efficient.
Our aim is to provide complex services that facilitate an independent life and accommodation, even after the housing allowance is terminated.
The program is financed for 75% by the European Union and 25% by the Ministry of the Interior, via the European Commission through the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (application ID: AMIF-2.2.8.-2015-00002).
https://www.bmszki.hu/en/mmia/mmia-program
Erasmus TrainHouse
Training for housing support workers (professional, volunteers and peers)
2016-2018
https://bmszki.hu/en/TrainHouse/project-aims
Ways out of homelessness
Ways out of homelessness: Good practices in pathways out of homelessness in Central Europe 2014-2016
https://bmszki.hu/en/erasmus/erasmus-project
MPHASIS 20006
Comprehensive review, analysis and assessment of the data collection and statistical system on the issue of homelessness in Hungary (2006) https://www.bmszki.hu/sites/default/files/fajlok/node-229/datacollection-final2.doc
EQUAL
The Budapest Methodological Centre of Social Policy and Its Institutions
(BMSZKI), together with the Shelter Foundation (Menhely Alapítvány) and the Budapest Metropolitan Social Fund, has been involved in a common project in the Equal initiative of the European Union*, supported by the Human Resource Development Operational Program of the Hungarian Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. With financial support from the European Union and the Hungarian government the three organizations have realized a joint project entitled “Labour market reintegration in the homeless sector”between July 1st, 2005. and December 31st, 2007, with preparations starting January 16th, 2005.
The goal of the project was the following: discovering new ways to enhance the social reintegration of homeless people, partly through the further development and dissemination of BMSZKI’s Employment – Accommodation – Addiction – Old Age Home Pilot Model (the theory and practice of a circle of experts), partly through the newly setup job centres and their services, and finally through activities targeting prejudices against homeless people. Our work was supported by our belief that though many homeless people lose “everything” they have due to the lack of adequate help, with adequate help they could be reintegrated into mainstream society, including the labour market. In most cases a temporary crisis can be resolved with intense and holistic help.
We have also realized that the current homeless service sector cannot provide this type of help for its clientele. Most services only offer accommodation as a base, and case workers do not have adequate tools to efficiently help users become independent and move out. Employment services on the other hand do not know how to help people with multiple disadvantages. There is no organized cooperation between the two sectors. The project emphasizes labour market reintegration in the fight against social exclusion. Case workers have been given new tools (integrating the social and employment sectors), their primary aim has become to enhance the employability of users and to help them find a job. We have constructed a network to help reach this goal: a system of holistic support in solving various problems of long-term accommodation, finding the right psichological balance essential to find and sustain a job, fighting problems of addiction and substance abuse. This brochure describes the results of the project. In the first part we give concrete, tangible results in numbers. In the second part you will find the stories of homeless people illustrating the success and difficulty of such a work.