19th June 2015: Members of Veterans Aid, as part of the charity’s commitment to preventing and tackling homelessness and social exclusion, have joined European colleagues at the 2015 FEANTSA Annual Policy Conference in Paris.VA is the only UK veterans charity with full membership of FEANTSA (The European Federation of National Organisations working with the Homeless), an NGO established in 1989to prevent and alleviate the poverty and social exclusion of people threatened by or living in homelessness. It is the only major European network that focuses exclusively on homelessness.
This years event, Key Steps to Connect Communities in Europe, has three objectives:
1. To support policy and practice in the field of homelessness, with a focus on social service/policy innovation.
2. To link local realities to differentEuropean policy/ legal frameworks, demonstrating where synergies exist already and reflect on potential synergies.
3. To provide space for the emergence of new transnational dynamics through organised networking hotspots.
*To see the full conference programme click below:
Background: Linking local and European Realities
The European Commission stepped up efforts in 2013 by publishing policy guidance to support Member States in their actions to confront homelessness, and programmes targeting homeless people are now eligible under the new European Structural and Investment Funds and under the Fund for European Aid to the most Deprived. The European Parliament has twice called for an EU homelessness strategy (in 2011 and 2014), and the EU Committee of the Regions reiterated this call end of June 2014.
Social Europe consists of two fundamental dimensions:
1. The European political arena in Brussels with all its institutional and non-institutional players pushing the EU social agenda
2. The transnational political arena which spans 28 EU countries and neighbouring countries, regularly bringing together social practitioners to exchange innovative policies/practices.
Funded mostly by the European Commission, FEANTSA’s key objective is to tackle and prevent homelessness, working in both these arenas to promote the rights of people experiencing homelessness.
There are currently two new emerging trends: on the one hand, the new European Commission (which started a 5-year mandate on 1st November 2014) wishes to get closer to local communities and citizens, to show the relevance of its work in their daily lives; on the other hand, experts in the field of homelessness (people with experience of homelessness, social workers, researchers, national/regional civil servants, local policy- makers and others) are increasingly interested in Brussels and neighbouring countries, always on the lookout for solutions and innovation.
FEANTSA is a European network which knows well these two (sub)national and European realities, and we would like our 2015 conference to link these two worlds in order to create new synergies.
