How impactful is Settle’s work?
Huge resources are ploughed into temporarily housing care leavers and homeless young people in hostels. Yet when their time comes to leave, their move is unsupported and abrupt. These young adults are at high risk of accumulating debt, eviction and homelessness for all kinds of reasons – not least because they lack essential life skills and experience and don’t have strong family networks to support them.
Our mission at Settle is to prevent youth homelessness by equipping at-risk young people with the skills needed to manage their money, home and health. We do this by delivering the Settle Tenancy Mentoring Programme which supports at-risk young adults, aged 18- 25, who are moving into their first tenancy.
The programme is up to 6 months long and is made up of weekly 1-1 sessions delivered in their homes by our Programme Officers who are accredited coaches. The key aim of our programme is that young people successfully sustain their tenancies and avoid eviction.
So how effective is our programme – and how does it help the vulnerable young people with whom we work?
In May 2017, we partnered with The Hyde Foundation on a one-year pilot to deliver the programme to new tenants who were moving into Hyde’s accommodation. We worked closely with Hyde to design an effective referral system to ensure young people were getting the support they needed to manage their money, tenancy and health.
Towards the end of 2018, we conducted with The Hyde Foundation an evaluation of the programme and its impact to date.
Over the pilot, we worked with 62 vulnerable young people, delivering over 250 hours, most of whom were care leavers, single parents, ex-homeless – or all of the above. Six months after they graduated from the programme, our study found that:
- 100% of these young people sustained their tenancy
- 90% reported improvement in their financial capability skills
- Settle graduates had on average £183 less rent arrears than their peers
The Hyde Foundation’s Maggie Houghton said:
“Settle’s work has proven a great success for Hyde in terms of ensuring that young people are successful when moving into their first home. We are seeing lower arrears and fewer tenancy breaches with the cohort of residents who have been working with Settle, and by getting it right from the start we’re setting these young people up to succeed in the long run. A reliable and consistent delivery partner, Settle has understood our need for rigid evaluation of the service and kept us informed using both performance data and case studies. We have been able to use this data to build a really strong case for continued provision of Settle’s service to young Hyde residents in the future, and we look forward to our continued partnership work.”