(Illustration by iStock/stellalevi)
In 20 years of working in the homelessness sector, I’ve come to believe that while housing is essential, long-term stability most often hinges on relationships and social integration. The journey out of homelessness doesn’t (only) end with a set of keys: It ends when someone is embedded in a community they belong to and can contribute to. It ends with connection.
From volunteering in night shelters, leading frontline services, and advising national policy—as well as ongoing research and everyday conversations with people navigating homelessness—I've come to understand that people don’t simply "use" services. They interpret, resist, and are shaped by them in deeply relational ways; emotional overwhelm, peer influence, and human connection shape their engagement with services in ways which determine how ultimately successful they can be. As a result, building stronger pathways out of homelessness means prioritizing not only shelter, but also belonging. In this sense, if housing is the foundation, relationships are the thing that keeps people in homes.
From this, five key principles emerge.
1. The Service Is a Bridge, Not the Outcome
Too often, we treat homelessness services as destinations, and when someone starts to engage with support, that’s often a huge win. But good services should not be stopping points. When services become someone’s whole world, it can make it harder for them to connect beyond that space. Countless times, I’ve seen someone thrive in a supportive program, until it ends and they’re left isolated again.
Services that act as bridges into community make long-term recovery more likely. Robert Putnam once described the difference between “bonding” and “bridging” social capital: Bonding capital connects people to others who are similar—often peers within the homeless community—but bridging capital opens doors to new social groups, networks, and opportunities. I’ve seen clearly how it’s bridging capital that helps people build a life beyond services: People who formed relationships outside the homeless community were more likely to sustain housing and move forward. Those whose networks remained tied to others still in crisis often found themselves pulled back.
One organization that gets this right is Change Please, a UK-based social enterprise that trains people experiencing homelessness to become baristas. It’s not just about the job. It’s about being in a public space, serving customers, having a routine, and wearing a uniform, as a gateway back into society. People are certainly paid a living wage and supported with housing, therapy, and financial tools, but, just as importantly, they’re re-entering the social fabric.
2. The ‘What’ Isn’t as Important as You Think
When people sign up for pre-tenancy courses or skills sessions, the content of those courses isn’t always as important as the experience of showing up. Having structure. Having someone to talk to. Feeling normal. People don’t just use services to learn; they engage to shape identity, connect with others, and construct meaning. Especially for someone who has been excluded for social connection (or surviving in crisis mode), even sitting in a group session can feel like reclaiming a piece of yourself.
I recall a conversation with someone who had been experiencing homelessness: He told me boredom was his biggest enemy. The streets were chaotic, but at least they weren’t empty. And so, when he finally moved into accommodation, what made the difference for him was keeping busy. He threw himself into every session his provider ran, not because he was desperate to learn to cook, but because it gave him something to do and someone to talk to.
At the King’s Arms Project in Bedford, activities like hiking, film clubs, and trips to the driving range aren’t called “interventions,” but that’s what they are. They help people reconnect with time, people, and the rhythm of ordinary life. Staff saw that people who got involved were more likely to move on to volunteering or work, not because of what they learned, but because of how they felt. Occupational therapy studies show that engaging in meaningful, shared activity can rebuild identity and self-worth—especially for those who’ve been socially excluded.
3. People Need Confidence
Homelessness doesn’t just take away a home. It chips away at identity. After months or years of surviving, people often lose touch with who they were, let alone who they might become. In my doctoral research, I’ve described this as “senseblocking”: a kind of emotional and cognitive fog where imagining a different future feels impossible. When someone’s stuck in that space, asking them what job they want or what their five-year plan is not only unrealistic, but unkind.
What people need first is confidence, and small, safe spaces where they can try things, fail, try again, and start to feel like themselves again. At Homeward Bound in Asheville, for example, residents at Compass Point Village can take on small roles—helping clean shared spaces, supporting other residents, assisting with maintenance tasks. We offer stipends for these roles, but the value is deeper than the money. It’s about being trusted, contributing, and feeling like part of something.
This kind of confidence-building aligns with research on “social efficacy,” or the belief that you can engage with others successfully. Without that belief, people often won’t risk joining a group, going to college, or applying for work. But it’s not about motivation; it’s about fear of failure or rejection. Services should therefore strive to create “on-ramps” back into society: spaces where people can rediscover their strengths, try things out, and begin to believe they belong again.
4. The Barriers Are Real
The path out of homelessness is full of invisible walls—practical, emotional, and relational. And often, they’re not about what people can’t do. They’re about what systems don’t see.
I’ve found that the reasons people disengaged from services are often more social than logistical. One man explained that he stopped attending a support group because he didn’t want to ask for a lift: As he was just starting to feel “normal,” he feared being seen as a charity case. In such a situation, the issue isn’t transport. It’s dignity.
Low social capital and a lack of trust only amplify the effects of poverty. When someone has been pushed to the margins, even small things—like asking for help—can feel risky. That’s why services work well when they pay attention to the small stuff. Right at Home, a national homelessness prevention partnership, offers rapid, flexible financial support to cover things like rent, bills, or small crises. A recent randomized control trial found that those who received this support were 81 percent less likely to become homeless within six months. Sometimes a few hundred dollars, offered quickly and with dignity, can change everything.
Progress out of homelessness isn’t only about opening doors, but about making sure people can walk through them. That means tackling the small, often overlooked barriers that prevent someone from showing up, again and again, until they feel they belong.
5. Don’t Focus on Sympathy
Sympathy may feel good to give, but it’s grace and truth that make change possible. For example, I recall feeling heartbreakingly sad when someone who spent his 16th birthday sleeping rough and lost his family because of his drug use told me his story. But sympathy didn’t help him. What helped was a relationship: Someone who showed up consistently, spoke honestly, and treated him like a person, not a case.
It’s easy to lean into compassion. But sympathy can actually, unintentionally reinforce distance. When homeless individuals are framed primarily through pity, it can lock them into narratives of dependency and strip away their agency.
Faith-based nonprofit leader Jon Kuhrt has written about finding a balance of kindness and honesty, grace and truth, for years on his Grace + Truth blog. As he puts it, grace without truth can feel indulgent, while truth without grace can be harsh. But together, they build the kind of accountability and dignity people need to grow.
People experiencing homelessness need someone to stand beside them—with honesty, belief, and consistent presence. At Hope into Action, for example, a UK charity that partners with churches to provide housing and relational support, volunteers are trained not to fix people, but to walk with them: to offer friendship, challenge, presence, and hope. It’s not about sympathy, but solidarity.
The Challenge
If relationships and community are so central to recovery, why aren’t they already embedded across homelessness systems? We’ve built our systems to count things, not to connect people. Most homelessness interventions are designed around measurable outputs—bed nights, housing placements, clinical assessments—but as important as such things are, the real reason is that they’re also easier to fund, track, and report, compared to the long, nonlinear work of relationship-building.
I get it. I’ve worked in the sector for over 20 years, and I have deep sympathy for commissioners and service providers under pressure to deliver urgent results in complex environments. When you’re constantly responding to crisis, it’s hard to invest in slow-burning change. But people don’t recover in line with performance frameworks. They recover in relationships.
This gap between what matters and what’s measured has been highlighted in research. One study found that many local authorities are forced to prioritize short-term, reactive services, even when they know long-term relational work is more effective. Another describes how relationship-based practices often fall outside standard commissioning frameworks, left to faith groups or volunteers operating with limited support.
Even when organizations want to prioritize connection, they face real barriers: staff burnout and turnover reduce consistency and trust; risk-averse cultures discourage experimentation; data-driven funding models demand quick, quantifiable outcomes; and service silos prevent people from integrating into everyday life.
Perhaps most fundamentally, we’ve created a category called “homeless services,” as if people who are experiencing homelessness need something completely different. But they need what everyone needs: safety, purpose, friends, community. What if instead of designing special systems for people on the margins, we focused on removing the barriers that pushed them out of the mainstream in the first place?
Relationship-first approaches aren’t about sentimentality. They’re about infrastructure. The challenge isn’t proving they work—it’s redesigning our systems to support them. Are we willing to redesign our systems—funding, staffing, culture—to make those relationships central, not incidental?
Because in the end, the solution isn’t complex. People need homes. But they also need people. And when we center both, we don’t just end homelessness. We build something better.
Read more stories by Simon Dwight.