You are here: Home / Media / Ending homelessness - A new focus for the Mercy Foundation

Ending homelessness - A new focus for the Mercy Foundation

The Mercy Foundation which has been based in Waterloo for over a decade has been an advocate for many groups of people and has provided financial support for the implementation of projects covering a wide range of social justice initiatives reports the South Sydney Herald of August 2008.

The Foundation, through its seed funding to the Asian Women at Work Association, played an important role in the successful FairWear campaign, a campaign which resulted in fairer wages and better conditions for outworkers employed in the clothing and textile Industry. Other projects supported by the Mercy Foundation have included programs for refugees and asylum seekers and educational, environmental and indigenous projects throughout Sydney, New South Wales and across Australia.

Founded by the North Sydney Sisters of Mercy in the late 1980s, the goal of the Foundation has always been to focus on issues that impact on the most disadvantaged people in our communities. The main aim of the Foundation is to change the structures that contribute to social inequity rather than responses that don’t challenge the systems that sustain disadvantage.

In a review of the Mercy Foundation in 2007, the Sisters of Mercy and the Board decided that the future direction of the foundation would be to work towards ending chronic homelessness. Sound impossible?

There is now some great evidence from the UK, the USA and Canada that it is possible to plan to end chronic homelessness and with some substantial results. The idea that there should always be a group of vulnerable, usually traumatised and sometimes very unwell people sleeping in our streets must be challenged. It has been successfully challenged elsewhere.

Early in 2008 a new CEO of the Mercy Foundation was appointed. Felicity Reynolds began work in late March and things are already well underway.

Felicity, who used to manage a community and homelessness services unit at the City of Sydney is not new to the area or to the issues. She has seen first hand the impact of poorly resourced services, lack of affordable and appropriate housing and the lack of support services for some of the most vulnerable people in our city.

Last year Felicity visited North America on a Churchill Fellowship, investigating programs that have successfully assisted chronically homeless people. She knows that there is no one magic solution to ending homelessness, but there are a range of successful permanent housing programs and other strategies that are getting great results elsewhere in the world.

Already the Mercy Foundation has become a founding member of the Australian Common Ground Alliance. This new group also has a new Patron, the Prime Minister’s wife – Therese Rein. Ms Rein has openly expressed her support for Common Ground and visited the New York organisation when she was in the USA earlier this year. 

The Alliance will be helping to develop new supportive housing initiatives across Australia.

The Mercy Foundation is also currently working with a number of other interested people and organisations to try to implement the first Common Ground initiative in Sydney. Felicity is working closely with Councillor Marcelle Hoff, from the City of Sydney, also a passionate supporter of the Common Ground approach.

The Mercy Foundation recently made a full submission to the Federal Government’s Green Paper on Homelessness ‘Which way home?’ Everyone associated with the foundation is excited at the possibilities and support the new government’s decision to do something about homelessness.

In May, the Mercy Foundation co-hosted with the Schizophrenia Fellowship of NSW, a roundtable discussion for senior government and non-government representatives with an interest in homelessness. The guest speaker at this event was Mr Philip Mangano, the Executive Director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH).

Encouraging local businesses, services, government agencies and others to work together to end the disgrace in their communities, USICH has been instrumental in supporting more than 300 local communities to develop 10 year plans to end homelessness. Mr Mangano very eloquently clarified the problem: “If humanitarian gestures, compassion and charity could have ended homelessness, they would have by now. It is time to do something different, something that solves it, not services it.”

More information about homelessness and the Mercy Foundation

The Mercy Foundation’s new website will be online very soon. It will include information on the Sisters of Mercy and their work in the community and provide resources on homelessness and ending chronic homelessness. Keep in touch with these activities by visiting www.mercyfoundation.com.au .

If you would like to support the work of the Sisters of Mercy through the Mercy Foundation contact them on (02) 9699 8726 or email executive@mercyfoundation.com.au .

Source: South Sydney Herald August 2008 www.southsydneyherald.com.au