Homes for Cathy

Homes for Cathy was founded in 2016 when a small group of housing associations formed in the 1960s and early 70s came together to mark the 50th anniversary of the seminal film ’Cathy Come Home’.  The original founders remained committed and launched an ongoing campaign with the aim of raising awareness of the needs of homeless people and building strategies to end homelessness.  

Today, Homes for Cathy’s 120 members span the country and include large national housing associations through to smaller, community-based housing providers - together they own and manage over 1.5 million general needs social homes and provide a broad range of homelessness services.  The group has worked with Crisis to develop a set of homelessness commitments – standards for members to work towards and by which their boards can hold them to account.

To support members in meeting the commitments, the group organises ’best practice’ workshops and an annual conference, sharing good work from across its membership in tackling homelessness.  Best practice sharing has focused on preventing evictions, creating psychologically informed environments, furnished tenancies, youth homelessness, tenancy training and housing destitute migrants.  The group also lobbies national Government to do more to tackle the homelessness crisis.