Thanks for all your support

On behalf of the Board, customers, and staff, I would like to thank you for your support throughout 2022 and wish you a happy, peaceful and successful New Year in 2023.

Focus Ireland #Focusireland is a national housing and homelessness organisation founded by the inspirational and courageous Sister Stanislaus Kennedy in 1985.

Stan built Focus Ireland on the premise that everyone has a right to a place they can call home.

That is Focus Ireland’s vision and the guiding principle of our work today.

Our goal is to end Homelessness in Ireland.

To do this our work is driven by two key pillars: Prevention and Sustained Exits.

Prevention is better than cure. Prevention stops the problem at source

Preventative strategies are a cost-effective and socially progressive approach to breaking the cycle of homelessness.

It can be as simple as providing advice and information to help in discussions with a landlord or helping someone with their entitlements – but it can make a vital difference in keeping a family at home.

Being proactive stops people from losing their homes and experiencing the trauma that so often strikes when they become homeless.

It’s often said the answer to homelessness is provide someone with a home. Sustained exists means providing someone with a home but also providing wrap-around services and support to enable our customers sustain their new homes and leave homelessness behind them, permanently.

These pillars are underpinned by an ambitious property acquisition plan.

Focus Ireland has services nationwide, tailored to the individual needs of our customers.

We have offices located in Dublin, Kildare, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Sligo, and Carlow, and provide outreach services to all other parts of the country.

Our five-year objectives are

·     to move 5,000 households out of homelessness,

·     to prevent 3,000 households from entering homelessness, and

·     to provide 1,152 additional homes through Focus Housing Association.

We know we cannot achieve the goal of ending homelessness in Ireland on our own. But what we can do is demonstrate how that goal can be achieved and achieved at scale.

At the end of 2022, we know that there is a record number of over 11,000 people in emergency accommodation in this country, with many more at risk of becoming homeless.

Almost 4,000 of those are children.

Those numbers are rising month over month. As a nation we have beaten our own record for the numbers of people homeless each month for the last 4 months.

But if we look back to the pandemic, to the worst of recent times, concentrated action, partnership and urgency drove the homelessness numbers down from around 10,500 to below 8,000 in May 2021. Sadly, the reverse has happened since then.

We know, any family entering homelessness - even one with no previous social problems - can experience quite severe issues after several months.

For a child being homeless for six months or more has a lifelong impact and increases their risk of becoming homeless as an adult.

On average, approximately 500 young people leave state care each year just because they turn 18, and, from our experience, around 100 of these will be particularly at risk of homelessness.

Despite these shocking figures, we know that we can solve this crisis.

We solve it for people every day. We did it during Covid. We need to build and sustain that progress.

Our programs are designed to prevent more families, children, and young people from becoming homeless, to support those already experiencing homelessness, and to minimise the harm caused during homelessness.

Because of your support, last year we were able to help 12,300 customers.

Approximately 1,527 families engaged with our services, including 3,338 children.

Your support also meant that approximately 1,288 households were supported to settle into a new home, or keep their existing home.

An end to homelessness really can be achieved, but only if, as a people, we make a clear, positive, and unshakable commitment to eradicating homelessness.

I am confident that our new strategy will guide and drive an end to homelessness in our country.

But we cannot do it alone.

Our success depends upon the ongoing dedication and support of many individuals and companies.

2022 has been a big year for Focus Ireland.

·     This year was our 10th Shine A Light Night, our 21st Sponsor A Star, our 1st ever Big Busk campaign, and the launch of our 1st podcast series.

·     We officially opened our Family Centre in Dublin city centre to enhance our support for children and families who are homeless

·     We officially launched our redeveloped, world-class High Street office, which won 4 awards at the Irish Fit Out awards and 1 at the Irish Construction Awards.

·     We also developed new offices in Cork, Limerick, and Sligo to strengthen our supports in these regions.

·     We realigned our Services to better serve our customers and released a Peer research guidebook that will impart the learnings gained from Focus Ireland’s peer research programme.

·     We have achieved significant progress in advocacy in things like the National Youth Homeless strategy launched by the Government in November, the moratorium on evictions to prevent people becoming homeless when there is nowhere for them to go, and the input to the proposed referendum on housing.

·     We launched our Major Gifts campaign ‘A Place Called Home’ to raise €30M over five years to ensure that key services and programmes set out in our new strategic plan can be funded and implemented in full.

·     Our team in Tipperary received an Excellence award for Tenancy Support and Sustainment.

·     Throughout 2021 and culminating this year in June with a launch event, Focus Ireland set about reviewing and refreshing the values of our organisation to ensure that our work doesn’t just boil down to what we do but how we go about doing it and what motivates us. We streamlined our values from nine down to four, and our new values of:

o  Dignity,

o  Quality,

o  Social Justice and

o  Empowerment

encapsulate what it means to be a Focus Ireland staff member or volunteer and how we engage with our customers on a daily basis. It was an honour to welcome former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, who joined me, and our Founder & Life President, Sister Stan for the launch event.

But these are not the achievements we should focus on. They only enable us to support our customers and achieve our goal of ending homelessness in Ireland

Without the generous engagement from people, I cannot imagine where we would be.

At this point at the start of 2023, it is inspiring to know we have the continued support of our friends in such large numbers, and I hope you will join me in committing together to pressing for real and lasting change in our society.

If we come together, as businesses, as individuals, and as policy makers we can affect results and see the gains of the last two years over covid come to fruition again.

Only when that happens, when society says enough is enough, when we say this is not the country we aspire to be, will this crisis see an end.

I am immensely proud to say that Focus Ireland has embarked on one of the most ambitious strategies in our history.

Together with the Government, we have committed to working to end homelessness in Ireland by 2030.

I hope for a day, when we can say that ‘it has happened,’ ‘the numbers of families experiencing homelessness is at an all-time low, or that we have effectively eradicated this experience’.

We must strive together as a society to solve this crisis for those most vulnerable among us.

So please continue using your voice to say this is not good enough, homelessness is bad for society, and we need to do more.

Change happens when we take small actions.

So, thank you again for everything you do and all of your incredible support of Focus Ireland.

Thank you for challenging homelessness and helping us to change lives.

We hope that you will continue to support us and work with us in 2023. #happynewyear #2023 #thanks