Six month anniversary of new Atlas of Homelessness Services in London

A unique website showing services for homeless people across London has reached its six month anniversary today.

The new Atlas, delivered by the London Housing Foundation in partnership with Homeless Link, is an interactive website that allows people to view service information and statistics across London, in a specific borough or at a multi-borough level.

Over 750 separate users have already logged in to the Atlas, and the Atlas has been updated with new rough sleeping figures from both official counts and estimates data. Today, the new annual CHAIN figures have been added; these highlight the number of people who have been contacted sleeping rough by outreach teams in London across a whole year.

Becky Rice is the project lead for the LHF. She said: “The Atlas includes data which has not been mapped in this way before – including some information new to the public. The Atlas can help you find out more about how the innovative Housing First model is being adopted in London, whether your local authority is commissioning street outreach services for rough sleepers and information about the huge contribution that winter shelters make.”

Simon Dow, Executive Chairman of the LHF said: “We are delighted that so many people have accessed the Atlas in its first few months and are very encouraged by the positive initial feedback. The Atlas has been widely welcomed by colleagues across the sector. We have big plans to expand the information and ensure it is accurate and up to date”

The next refresh of the Atlas will include a new map of specialist health services in London. This will make the Atlas even more useful to front line workers as well as researchers, policy makers, and those working in business development and strategy. The refresh will also enable users to identify services that are women/ men only and those specifically for young people.

The LHF and Homeless Link encourage anyone who is a current or potential user of the Atlas to complete a very short survey to help us continue to develop and improve the product:

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/ATLAS_stakeholders2019

To see a video illustrating the new Atlas go to https://youtu.be/8JX0jruRXS4. To access the Atlas go to www.lhfatlas.org.uk

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