HPLS work with homeless people
The Homeless Persons’ Legal Service’s has a long history of seeking to engage those that have experienced homelessness in our advocacy and public policy work.
HPLS experiences with involving homeless people in our policy work have led us to believe that traditional consultation mechanisms such as lengthy surveys are often not only inappropriate but also disempowering to people experiencing homelessness
HPLS has overcome the disempowering nature of formal consultations through adopting innovative approaches to engaging homeless people. One recent example of this was consultations HPLS conducted as part of our submission to the National Consultation on Human Rights Protection.
In order to ensure that HPLS’s consultation with homeless people were conducted in an accessible way, our consultations were conducted jointly with Milk Crate Theatre. During the consultation,actors from Milkcrate Theatre performed three stories that were inspired by the real life stories of people from the homeless community. Each of these stories reflected and explored a number of different human rights issues and how they are currently protected in law in Australia. After these stories were presented, the audience was encouraged to throw suggestions that changed the plot and ultimately the outcome of the story, making new decisions for the characters that would achieve more rights respecting outcomes for the central character. In total over 130 homeless people attended one of these consultation events and had input into HPLS final submission to the National Consultation on Human Rights.
HPLS is also attempting to creatively engage homeless people as part of its upcoming work on criminal record discrimination.
In order to obtain the ideas, stories and input of those experiencing homelessness into this discrimination project, HPLS intends to conduct an interactive consultation process in partnership with the National Homelessness Clearinghouse website. To ensure these consultations are accessible and effective, HPLS intends to conduct them using internet based flash animation.
The flash animation tells a very simple story of a person attempting to obtain employment in an area he has worked for a number of years. The interview is progressing well until his potential employer conducts a criminal record check and finds the applicant has a previous conviction for assault. The employer then ends the interview telling the applicant ‘don’t call us we will call you’. The flash animation concludes by highlighting that what has just been seen is criminal discrimination and that HPLS needs their help to make sure that the law can be changed to make this unlawful. An opportunity is then provided for the viewers to provide their own stories and experiences with criminal record discrimination
