Rhona Brown
Strategic Homes Lead, Homewards
A home needs more than four walls. Through collaboration, Homewards is making furniture and essential items accessible for people moving out of homelessness.
Moving into a home should represent a fresh and exciting new start. Yet for many people who have experienced homelessness or temporary accommodation, an empty property presents a new challenge.
According to End Furniture Poverty, only three per cent of social tenancies are furnished, compared to 30 per cent of private rentals. Without somewhere to wash clothes, sleep comfortably, store fresh food or cook a meal, settling into a tenancy can be difficult. Across the homelessness sector this problem is widely understood, but solutions tend to rely on local charities and hardship funds, which in recent years have been overwhelmed due to the spike in the cost of living, and the increases in homelessness.
Homewards is helping tackle this often-overlooked barrier by bringing together organisations from across sectors to ensure people have the essential items they need to turn a property into a home.
Founded by Prince William and The Royal Foundation in 2023, Homewards aims to demonstrate that homelessness can be ended – making it rare, brief and unrepeated. Working across six UK locations, the programme supports locally led solutions that prevent homelessness and help people sustain housing.
But the most important outcome from the Homewards furniture project is the human impact
A collaborative solution
Homewards Furniture Project brings together several major retailers, including Bosch Home Appliances, IKEA, DFS, B&Q and Gordon Brown’s charity, The Multibank. The Multibank distributes thousands of high-quality returned and surplus essential items each year to organisations supporting people on low incomes across the UK. Together, these pioneering partners have committed to furnishing 250 homes across Homewards’ six locations with furniture and household items worth £2.3 million.
The initiative is built on a simple principle: helping people access essential items they need while ensuring valuable goods are put to positive use. Through the donation of surplus, returned, recycled and brand-new furniture and electrical items, Homewards connects businesses with charities and local organisations, ensuring support reaches the right people at the right time.
As the Rt Hon. Gordon Brown, President of The Multibank explains: “Companies have the goods people need and local charities know the people who need them”, enabling the “Homewards team to provide safe and secure places, where we hope people can thrive.”
The Furniture Project in Action
In Sheffield, Homewards’ furniture project is helping families leaving temporary accommodation settle into permanent homes. Alongside other retailers, Bosch Home Appliances has partnered with local organisations including SOAR to provide essential household appliances.
“The project reflects what we stand for at BSH: improving the quality of life at home,” says Nigel Eccles. “This initiative shows that our corporate values are not empty words, but make a real, tangible difference in people’s lives.”
He adds: “Instead of disposing of these products through a low value reseller, they make a life-changing difference here.”
For Daniel Clayton of SOAR, a local Sheffield charity, the partnership demonstrates the strength of local collaboration. “What’s great about Homewards is that nothing is dictated from above. We get the resources, but we develop solutions directly on site as a network of charities, the city, and companies like Bosch.”
But the most important outcome from the Homewards furniture project is the human impact. It’s hard to overestimate the impact of those items which make a house into a home, instead of just four walls, helping to give people the foundations they need to find stability, safety and security in the words of one man in his 50s from Aberdeen who was supported by the Homewards Furniture Project after he experienced homelessness, “I’ll say this until I’m red in the face: I’m forever grateful for the assistance. It literally changed my life.”
By combining national resources with local expertise, the Homewards Furniture Project is helping individuals and families move into homes feeling safe, stable and supported, demonstrating how collaboration can create practical solutions to homelessness that can be scaled across the UK.
