Our impact on homelessness

City Mission Outreach worker Josh does his rounds of the inner-city streets in the mornings to check up on the rough sleepers.

The young woman pointed to the space in her flat’s family room where she and her partner stood when they first walked into the flat. “I started getting emotional,” she remembered. “I didn’t believe it. I was thinking, ‘It can’t be real. This cannot be real’. I couldn’t cry then, but I cried when everyone left.”

For this young person, this is the impact of finding yourself in a flat after living for months in a car on the Christchurch streets. The person who had knocked on their car window one morning and started the process of finding suitable housing was our City Mission Outreach worker, Josh.

The wider impact we have on the lives of the homeless in Christchurch is immense and is covered particularly by the work of our emergency shelters, transitional housing, Outreach service and social workers. However, it also includes the work done by our other services that clients can access, once they come to the Mission for support.

The City Mission Outreach Service goes to people who are rough sleeping on the streets. In 2023, we made 1,968 one-to-one contacts with these men and women. Many people who sleep rough take a long time to build trust. We invest in and accept this process, and where we can build up trust, it can be the beginning of their journey with the Mission. There are those who for many reasons prefer to stay on the streets. We still support them as best we can, often with the supply of sleeping bags.

Last year we provided 137 sleeping bags. Once homeless people come into our system the first contact is often with our men’s and women’s emergency accommodation shelters. Each night, 365 days of the year, we can offer accommodation for 15 men and 12 women. We are a genuine emergency shelter where people can turn up at 5pm for a free bed and care. In 2023, our emergency shelter beds were used gratefully by 283 men and 155 women. These are people who were in crisis and had nowhere else to go.

2023 saw the introduction of our newest facility to look after people struggling to find accommodation in Christchurch. Our new transitional housing building we call Whakaora Kāinga completed its first year of operation in December 2023. This brand new 3-storey building has three apartments with a total of 14 beds. Residents are former homeless people, many of whom will have stayed in our men’s and women’s emergency shelters on our site. They are with us for three months where our new communal living model includes heavily structured support, along with courses and learning and development activities designed to lift residents’ confidence and skills and remove barriers which previously have prevented them from successfully moving to permanent accommodation.

In 2023, we had 24 residents successfully move to new homes thanks to their stay with us.

Read the full Impact Report 2023 here.