Homeless Hub

Introduce the Cardano Community to homeless communities in Manchester, UK, through in-person workshops and online sessions.

Stephen Whitenstall and Vanessa Cardui each have decades of experience of leading community projects. Details below.

Impact - How we address the challenge question

This proposal will initiate a 6-month experiment in communication and understanding between the Cardano community, and homeless communities in Manchester, UK.

Homeless people in the UK come from a diverse mix of different social backgrounds, cultures, languages, and migration status; but due to their homelessness, they form a distinct and cohesive community, with a culture of its own. This culture includes lived experience of exclusion, poverty and marginalisation; and also, a tendency towards mutual aid, because homeless people have to develop networks of mutual support between themselves in order to survive. As a result, "homeless culture" often has a perspective on questions of value and contribution that is unique and vital. We believe this perspective could enrich the Cardano community; and in turn, Cardano could empower homeless people. By inviting homeless people to engage with Cardano from where they are, using the perspective of their community and its culture, and by using facilitators who have their own lived experience of homelessness, we are addressing the challenge's key focus on enabling people to bring their own cultural understanding to Cardano.  "Cultural understanding" is not only about the culture of a particular country or language – it can also be about shared experience.

The people we will reach are unlikely to have any blockchain expertise, although they may have some tech skills. So we are addressing the challenge's aim of driving adoption at ground level, by people who do not already have blockchain expertise. And because the UK homeless community includes a mix of migrant people and UK-born people, and a wide range of levels of ability in English, our project also addresses the challenge's aim of enabling people to take part in their own language; our budget includes money for interpretation/translation where needed, and we plan to pay people from within the community itself as interpreters, and to encourage participants to work in their first language if they wish.

The first step in empowering any community to change their lives is to create a space where people can develop and crystallise their OWN understanding of the problem. This might be called community "problem-sensing". By making space for this, our project meets the challenge of empowering people to change their lives.

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What the Homeless Hub will do

1. Problem-Sensing Workshops

A series of 15 weekly workshops will be held with homeless communities in Manchester, UK, working in association with local grassroots homeless organisations that the proposal team have existing links with.

These workshops will explore questions of value, worth, contribution, power, governance and participation through the lens of lived experience of homelessness, and will allow time and space for participants to define and articulate problems, and research whether these problems could be addressed using blockchain technology.

Sessions will be documented, and key questions and perspectives that arise in sessions will be fed back to the Cardano community through its various channels (e.g. Discord; Telegram; the Town Hall; social media), thus opening dialogue between the homeless community and the Cardano community.

2. Building a community hub

These initial workshops will build confidence, and shared understanding, to enable the group of homeless people to lead a community hub.

This hub will have its roots in the homeless community, but might also engage others locally. We envisage it leading to a public event where homeless people can tell non-homeless locals about blockchain technology and its implications for all of our empowerment.

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Our measures of success

at 3 months (end of January 2022)

• 3 organisations working with homeless people onboarded. At least 10 participants engaged, and sessions are in progress.
• Initial baseline evaluation done with participants – what did they know about blockchain before the project?
• Participants feel welcomed in the sessions, know that their contribution is valued, and are enjoying taking part.
• Participants report increased awareness of blockchain technology, increased confidence in expressing ideas about it.
• Participants are beginning to take ownership, and shape the project towards the things that interest them.
• We (facilitators and participants) are regularly sharing short insights from the sessions, via social media, Catalyst sessions, Town Hall, etc; and opening channels of communication and dialogue between Cardano and the project participants.

A mid-term evaluation will ask participants whether all this is happening. (If it's not, project team and participants will look at how to fix it.)

at 6 months (end of April 2022)

• All 15 sessions delivered. Sessions have been a homeless-led space, where people could think and talk about ideas around value, worth, contribution, power, governance and participation in a way that centres their experience and perspectives.
• A final project output or launch has been developed by participants, marketed widely, and delivered. This could be an event engaging the wider public, or something more internal to the homeless community, depending on what participants want to do.
• During project delivery, we have found meaningful ways to create a 2-way dialogue between participants and Cardano, and to share with Cardano the insights emerging from the sessions, giving homeless people a voice in Cardano's thinking on how to engage communities. Or, if we've identified barriers to this, we have looked together at how to address those barriers.
• The project has focused on the strengths and skills of the homeless community, not purely on its problems. Also, participants have been able to take part as *people*, and have not focused solely on homelessness issues if they didn't want to.
• Any barriers to ongoing participation have been clearly identified, and possible solutions discussed with participants.
• Participants have been publicly credited, in whatever ways they choose, for all their contributions to the project.

at 12 months (end of Nov 2022; i.e. after end of project)

• The project team will write a report, documenting best practice and learning-points from the project, and will share it with participants, homeless organisations in the UK and worldwide, and Cardano.
• The experiences of the project will add to ongoing conversations within Cardano about how to onboard people "on the ground" in communities around the world, and how to create mechanisms for effective dialogue between Cardano and communities.
• 12 months on, Homeless Hub might not continue in its original form (i.e. running regular weekly sessions) – but we aim for it be able to demonstrate some kind of legacy. This could include ongoing personal contacts and networking between project particpants and Catalyst (or individuals within Catalyst); ongoing links with organisations who work with homeless people, both in Manchester and more widely; increased awareness of Cardano in the homeless community; and ideally, the project team mentoring project participants to develop a proposal for Fund 8 or 9 which is led and devised by the homeless community themselves.

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Expected public launch date

The project will be launched to the homeless community in late November/early December 2021.

The public launch date will be in April 2022, as part of the project's final output or event.

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Key potential risks, and how we will mitigate them

• COVID issues (e.g. if there is a further UK lockdown) might make indoor, face-to-face group sessions impossible. This currently seems unlikely to happen in the UK after October; but if it does, we will mitigate by delivering via a combination of remote methods (e.g. video, online discussion), one-to-one meetings, and outdoor/walking group sessions as we move into Spring.

• Participant dropout rates can be high with this community; often because projects are too inflexible, and do not understand the barriers to participation that homeless people face. We will mitigate by building group cohesion gradually (for example, structuring the early sessions so each one is self-contained and people don't have to attend them all); by offering expenses to enable participants to attend; and by offering ways that participants can contribute remotely if they miss a session, or even keep in touch with the project remotely if they need to drop out altogether. We'll also engage the help of our partner homelessness organisations, to encourage and support participants; and we'll initially recruit more participants than our minimum, to allow for some dropping-out.

• Slight risk that media myths about the "crypto boom" might give participants unrealistic expectations of what the project can offer. We will mitigate this with clear information from the outset about what the project will offer; and by enabling participants to find out about blockchain, discuss the issues, and counter the myths.

• Risks around sustaining the energy after the end of the funded project. We will mitigate this by our focus throughout on empowering participants to take ownership, so that when funding ends, participants have the tools to continue for themselves. We will also ensure that participants, and the staff of the homeless organisations we are working with, know how to stay connected with Cardano and with Catalyst after the end of the project, and that participants particularly have support to do so and are welcomed. We also aim, after the end of the project, to mentor participants to create their own homeless-led proposal for fund 8 or 9.

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Proposal Team

Stephen Whitenstall (@swhitenstall) has personal experience of homelessness, living in hostels for 5 years between 2004 and 2010. In 2005, with Groundswell UK, Stephen was a founder of "Outside-In" a homeless user involvement group in St Mungo's (The largest homeless charity in London). He helped design a peer facilitation training programme for use in hostels, led workshops and mentored homeless residents to participate in the planning process of a new Hostel in Kensington and Chelsea (now managed by Look ahead). He also articulated homeless issues to Parliament (ODPM) and the Audit Commission. Stephen gained OSW funding (20k) for and managed the social enterprise of "Crafty Folk "a Homeless Artists Market Stall at Spitalfields, City of London for which he won an award for innovation from Crisis UK (2006). https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-whitenstall-166727210/

Vanessa Cardui (@CallyFromAuron) is a skilled facilitator and community engagement manager, with over 20 years' experience of participatory work with communities. She is inspired by her own lived experience of homelessness as a young woman; and has developed and led a range of groundbreaking publicly-funded community engagement projects in the UK, working with marginalised communities such as homeless people, Gypsies and Travellers, refugees and asylum seekers, migrants, and working-class urban communities. She has managed successful partnerships between these communities and third-sector organisations, to address issues such as digital inclusion, creative placemaking, and access to public space and resources. She is committed to amplifying the voices of marginalised people, and working in ways that centre their experiences and empower them to build their own solutions. A key focus of her practice is the idea of the Archive in marginalised communities – how those with experience of social exclusion decide which objects they value, and preserve them for posterity outside of professional museums. For example, see The National Archives Of The Republic Of The Homeless, a 2019 project with homeless and ex-homeless artists in Hull, England: https://homeless.omeka.net

Homeless Hub is a project of QA-DAO (https://stephen-rowan.gitbook.io/quality-assurance-dao/) an ongoing open source project that provides support for the Cardano Project Catalyst Community. Homeless Hub's project documentation will follow  QA-DAO ideals of open-source transparency and auditability.

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Budget

Facilitator: initial liaison with grassroots homeless orgs; 5 days' work over a 2-month period at start of project (end October 2021 to December 2021).
$ 1375

Facilitator: direct work with participants, plus session planning, monitoring/evaluation, marketing and promotion, and ongoing project development, early January 2022 to end April 2022
$ 7000

Participants' expenses - to recompense participants for giving us their expertise.
$ 4000

Community interpreters' expenses
$ 2100

Materials budget / production costs (Whatever the group wants to produce, e.g. a public event, minting an NFT, producing a short film, etc.)
$ 2500

Room hire
$ 600

Zoom account
$ 165

GitBook account costs
$ 140

Project tracking on GitHub
$ 1100

Total $ 18980

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How this proposal will impact the challenge metrics

How many new Hubs were launched in the next 6 months?

Our proposal will set up one new hub.

How many new users of Cardano were onboarded?

The project will directly reach 10 participants from the homeless community, who will be onboarded into Cardano. Additionally, the project will attract wider attention, and we aim to onboard 5 additional people, both from the non-homeless local community where we are working, and among the staff of organisations working with homeless people in the UK.

What was the total reach of the Hub's initial marketing launch?

Initially we will be working with a core group of homeless participants to build capacity, and the Hub will not be fully public. We aim for 30 people (both homeless people, and staff working in homeless organisations) to become aware of the project, and of these, 10 homeless people will form the core project participants. The public marketing launch, to market and promote the project's outcome event in April, will happen later in the project; we aim to reach c. 1,000 people with our marketing, via social media, live publicity materials distributed locally, and word-of-mouth.

How many external organizations did this community-focused challenge bring into the Cardano ecosystem?

The project will draw its participants from 3 organisations working with homeless people in Manchester, UK, so these organisations will therefore be aware of the Cardano ecosystem. During the course of the project, we aim to conduct outreach to 3 additional community organisations in the local area (such as tenants' groups, parents' groups, etc), and bring them into the Cardano ecosystem via social media engagement with our project, raised awareness of Cardano, and offering the opportunity to join Catalyst workshops and events such as Town Halls.

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References

- A home for all: Understanding migrant homelessness in Great Britain

https://www.crisis.org.uk/media/241452/a_home_for_all_understanding_migrant_homelessness_in_great_britain_2019.pdf