Homeless people come from any background — and homelessness can happen to anybody, says Nicole Wiggins, director of The Early Morning Centre, a community hub on Northbourne Avenue supporting Canberrans experiencing homelessness and isolation, and which celebrated its 20th anniversary last month.
Almost 100 ‘guests’ pass through the Centre each day. Some have postgraduate degrees and once ran their own businesses; one speaker owned multiple homes and a company worth millions, but lost everything when a business decision went wrong.
Others spent their lives in the foster care system, experienced mental health issues, and never had steady work, income, or real social or family connections.
And others might suffer an illness or accident that stops them from working; without savings, they cannot pay rent, and it does not take long to lose their housing.
“A lot of people live paycheque to paycheque,” Ms Wiggins said. “That person hasn’t necessarily done something to get in that situation; they’re not homeless because they deserve to be homeless, because they did something wrong.”
The popular image of homeless people is someone loud, drunk, and dirty, but they do not represent the majority. In fact, someone in your very office might be homeless: sleeping in their car or in a tent, washing themselves in municipal showers or bathroom sinks, and getting dressed to go to work.
Whoever guests are, the Centre shows them they are valuable, that somebody cares for them, notices them.
“Our philosophy is offering a warm, safe space for anybody without judgement, treating people as an individual, and not putting them into a box,” Ms Wiggins said.
Demand for services has risen, she believes — not just because numbers dwindled during the COVID-19 pandemic and have since recovered, but because rents in Canberra are high, and little housing is available to people on Centrelink payments.
“It’s not great,” Ms Wiggins said. “Once somebody’s homeless, or sleeping in their car, it’s very hard to get out of that… I see so many people — working families — on the verge of homelessness.”
Some sobering statistics from ACT Shelter: The ACT has the highest rate of persistent homelessness in Australia (43 per cent of all clients). The number of people seeking assistance from specialist homelessness services in the ACT has increased by 22 per cent over eight years (from 1,606 in 2017 to 1,964 this year). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are vastly over-represented among homeless people: they are 10 times more likely to seek support from specialist homelessness services, and comprise nearly half of persistent homeless people. The ACT is the jurisdiction with the highest rate of people seeking assistance for homelessness and experiencing drug or mental health issues. Drug use is often self-medication, Ms Wiggins emphasises: addiction is a response to homelessness and mental illness, not a cause.
The EMC began as a breakfast facility in 2005, open for a couple of hours each day. It is now open seven days a week: on weekdays, breakfast is served from 7.30 to 8.30am, then the hub is open 9am to 2pm; on weekends, 9am to 1pm. On an average day, 30 to 45 people come for breakfast, and 60 for lunch.
“People living on the street can feel invisible, because people walk past and avert their eyes,” Ms Wiggins says. “Here, we remember names, and how their coffee is made… They feel seen and heard; people get a bit of dignity back.”
Michael, one of the guests, says that not feeling included wears away at the self. “The more you dwell in not feeling like belonging, then you start not belonging to yourself. That’s where perfectly good people fall into psychological traps like self-harm or feeling worthless.”
The EMC counters that. “I’ve seen people who’ve never really spoken to anyone for years and years start having conversations with the staff,” Michael says.
Besides food and human contact, the EMC provides clothing, showers, lockers, phone and computer access, a contact point for people without a phone, and a postal service, and stores important documents such as birth certificates and proof of age cards.
Services visit throughout the week: on Mondays, legal services, Orange Sky laundry, and the Capital Health mobile clinic; on Tuesdays, Hepatitis ACT and St Vincent de Paul’s Street to Home Team; on Wednesdays, the drug and alcohol service CAHMA; and on Fridays, Care Financial Counselling. Housing ACT visits regularly, and podiatrists and vets once a month. Church groups or charities like HelpingACT host lunches. The EMC also runs a current affairs discussion group and arts and crafts, and has offered computer classes in the past.
This broad spectrum of services is important because people who have been on the streets for a while or who are on low incomes usually face more than one issue, Ms Wiggins says: legal problems; debt; and a high percentage have physical or mental health problems.
The EMC is “a one-stop shop where we can give people information on the range of different services, to make it easier for people to access them,” Ms Wiggins explains. “Otherwise, it’s incredibly difficult to navigate the system, even though Canberra is a small place.”
Michael has been coming almost since the start. “I was in great need at the time,” he said. “I was on the street. I didn’t have a home. [The EMC] became a good central point for me to get resources consistently enough to build health [and break] the cycle of being on the street. I wasn’t very used to it, because I’d had a home and worked all my life. … [The EMC] gave me a springboard. … The key to it is that you can have a place that people [and services] can meet at.”
Charging his phone meant he could stay in touch with the real world; he could meet his caseworker, keep appointments, and stay connected. Now, Michael has his own place through government housing.
Although the EMC tries to help people find emergency or low-cost housing, options are limited. Ainslie Lodge takes men over 18 without pets, and the Queanbeyan Sleepbus accepts couples and dogs. Choices for women experiencing homelessness are scarce, however, unless domestic violence is involved; in that case, the EMC connects survivors with the Domestic Violence Crisis Service. All refuge placements (for men, women, or young people) go through OneLink, whose centralised bed list makes access fairer and saves the EMC from ringing around multiple refuges.
Waiting lists for government housing are far too long, Ms Wiggins thinks; she believes more public and community homes must be built. The government could give tax incentives to ‘mum and dad’ investors to offer their rental property below the market rent.
The ACT Government, she notes, is well aware of the problem, but if Canberra tried to solve it alone, by rapidly expanding public housing, it would be flooded by demand from interstate.
Instead, because the housing crisis is national, it needs a national solution. Ms Wiggins thinks Australia should follow the example of Scandinavian countries that treated housing as a human right, as essential as a hospital bed; they taxed large investors and businesses to fund housing, and people were given homes for life.
“I don’t think anything they’ve done is particularly magical,” Ms Wiggins said. “It’s just that they recognised we need to take measures.”
The public can help the Early Morning Centre by volunteering, donating money, or contributing clothes and food. The EMC hands out food parcels to guests every week: workplaces can assist by setting up baskets for staff to drop in tins of baked beans or other staples. (Please contact the EMC first before donating goods, as their storage space is limited.)
For those who cannot give time or money, starting conversations about homelessness matters, Ms Wiggins says.
“Changing community attitudes also helps to change government attitudes. The stronger support there is in the community that nobody should sleep on the street and no family should sleep in a car with kids, then the stronger pressure there is on governments to make big investments and remodel the whole system in a way that works, such as other countries have done.”
Ms Wiggins is often asked whether to give money to people on the street. Her advice: If you want to be sure your money goes towards food, then buy the person something to eat or donate to a food service, and remind them (although most already know) where they can get free food: breakfast at the Early Morning Centre or dinner at Vinnies Roadhouse, for instance.
If you are comfortable with the person spending money however they choose, give it to them directly.
As for people spending money on alcohol or other drugs — “If I were sleeping on the streets in freezing Canberra, I’d probably have a bottle of wine next to me, too, because it’ll keep you warm. And it’s a pretty miserable place to be. [I don’t] harshly judge people for whatever drug it is they take to make sleeping on the street easier.”
That said, not everybody asking for money on the street is homeless, she cautions: some are trying to collect money for drugs.
“I never tell people what they should do, just: ‘This is maybe what you could think about when you are approached for money.”
The Early Morning Centre is grateful for its volunteers, its supporters, and its relationships with the “incredibly supportive” ACT Government in reaching its 20-year milestone, Ms Wiggins said.
“If you took any of those [elements] out, we would still have a service, but it would make it very difficult.”
And some of Canberra’s disadvantaged would be in worse straits, without the warmth and compassion that Ms Wiggins and the Early Morning Centre show every day.
The Early Morning Centre, 69 Northbourne Avenue, Canberra City. Website: https://www.emc.org.au/.
