GROW is Thames Reach's three-year initiative to increase the number of people working in the homelessness organisations who have personal experience of homelessness and service use.

This involved changing our organisational culture and practices, and creating new routes into employment for homeless people.

Our initial target, which has been exceeded, was to have 10% of our own workforce with a history of homelessness by June 2007.

What you can find here

We hope these pages will assist other organisations interested in working towards similar goals. They contain:

How Thames Reach went about changing the culture of the organisation, including policies, recruitment methods and staff attitudes
How we opened up new employment opportunities for homeless people (in particular, dedicated traineeships)
What we learnt; our successes and failures
Stories from service user employees, their supervisors and 'life coaches', and senior managers at Thames Reach – through audio interviews, written case studies and a short film

January 2009 - GROW goes national

Over the past 3 years, Thames Reach has successfully created an organisational culture change that enables the organisation to employ current and former service users across all teams and functions. Through the Giving Real Opportunities for Work (GROW) Project, Thames Reach has exceeded its target of 10% of its workforce having an experience of homeless by 2007.

Download the full national Grow programme document below:

Grow goes national - [186 KB] Download the full national Grow programme document.

National Conference on Employing Service Users in the Homelessness Sector

On 1 April Thames Reach and Homeless Link hosted 'Making the Extraordinary Ordinary' a one-day conference aimed at sharing good practice and models for employing service users.

This was an opportunity for chief executives, senior managers and funders of homelessness services to explore the benefits of opening up jobs to homeless people, and how to break down any barriers. Feedback from delegates was overwhelmingly positive.

Audio from the Conference

Read a Summary Report of the Conference below:

Service User Employment Conference Report Summary April 2008 - [28.01 MB] Thames Reach and Homeless Link National Conference on Employing Service Users in the Homelessness Sector

ESF UK EUROPEAN COMMUNITY European Social Fund

For more information please contact Kath Dane, GROW manager, on 0207 702 5638 or at kath.dane@thamesreach.org.uk.