“As humans, we can be ingenious. We have sent people to the Moon and invented the internet and yet we seem incapable of ending homelessness on our home planet. We have the capabilities and the resources to come up with solutions, but first we must commit ourselves to meeting the challenge together,” says Mel Young, Co-Founder and President of the Homeless World Cup and a Founder Member of Catalyst 2030.
That’s why the Homeless World Cup and Catalyst 2030 have joined forces to launch Cities Ending Homelessness. This joint collaboration aims to end homelessness in cities around the world completely. It is a bold ambition. But it is one that Catalyst 2030 believes its network of thousands of proven social innovators, working on local solutions in communities around the world, is best placed to help achieve.
The initiative started in 2022 when discussions were held across the globe where ideas and innovative solutions were shared. The Homeless World Cup joined forces with Catalyst 2030 to drive the project.
At the centre of the initiative are people who are homeless. As Mel asserts, “A crucial part of that will be to listen to the voices of homeless people and former homeless people themselves whose ideas are often unheard or ignored.”
Cities are where they tend to congregate to access resources, and cities therefore deal with the challenges of providing services. Cities need solutions and it is in cities that they are most likely to be generated. Cities Ending Homelessness therefore plans to invite city leaders from countries around the globe who have already developed solutions to homelessness. The initiative will call on them to share their solutions and, together, take them to scale. To this end it is also calling on policy makers and funders to help bring about fundamental change.
Initial plans are to build a global network of cities and link them with teams of social innovators and researchers to share best practices and experience, and to collaborate to develop creative solutions.
Cities Ending Homelessness is launching during the 2023 Homeless World Cup in July 2023 Sacramento, California, where the event is being held in the US for the first time. To kick off the project, the Homeless World Cup and Catalyst 2030 are simultaneously holding a symposium, at Sacramento State University. The symposium will encourage cities to join the initiative, starting with some of the cities already involved in the Homeless World Cup. This will be followed by a series of events in cities all around the world to highlight global homelessness and potential solutions.
The Homeless World Cup is a global movement which uses the power of football to help homeless people change their own lives. It partners with grassroots organisations in more than 70 countries, and every year, it holds a football tournament in leading cities all around the world, to showcase the achievements of its national partners and change public attitudes to homelessness issues. Since it was founded in 2003, the Homeless World Cup has had an impact on the lives of 1.2 million people.
Where to read Cities Ending Homelessness
Read the Cities Ending Homelessness – A Global Initiative of the Homeless World Cup and Catalyst 2030 report on the Catalyst 2030 website.