LEAF Activities

The Lived Experience Advisory Forum (LEAF) helped advise and shape this thesis on the history of homeless policy in the UK.
It charts the evolution of the State’s approach to homelessness and it centres the stories of those on the receiving end of Government approaches to homelessness, including those from LEAF. It finds that the lived experience of the homeless reveals a disparity between the intention of government policy and its implementation. Ambiguity allowed local authorities to tend towards inaction, insufficient provision, and a growing overreliance on the voluntary sector
Read more in this downloadable version of Pavement Politics: The relationship between homeless policy, practice, and experience in England, c. 1960s-2010.

During the last two years LEAF has worked collaboratively with various support services and Oxford University on projects to understand the issues around homeless, health inequalities and service provision. The results from LEAF’s work have identified a gap in service provision to address gender-specific men’s issues in a non-judgmental space for emotional expression. Men often suppress emotions due to societal expectations; the support group will give them the opportunity and safe space to express their feelings, learn coping strategies, and improve emotional intelligence.

We are currently developing a project that incorporates a combination of a series of workshops and ongoing weekly support group meetings to deal with these issues. The aim is to launch these new services at a later date. The Men’s Health Workshops Report and Proposals for a Men’s Health Support Group documents provide detail on our plans for this project.

LEAF partnered with Aspire to hold 5 community engagement workshops on behalf of the nascent Oxfordshire Community Research Network (CRN).

We held community workshops in:
• Witney in May 2023, attended by 13 people experiencing homelessness.
• Central Oxford in May 2023, attended by 14 people experiencing homelessness.
• Didcot in April 2024, attended by 14 people experiencing homelessness.
• Banbury in May 2024, attended by 7 people experiencing homelessness.
• East Oxford in May 2024, attended by 12 people experiencing homelessness.

On each occasion, team members from Aspire and LEAF worked together to facilitate the workshops. It is important to underline that of the 60 workshop participants:
• 100% were experiencing homelessness; a few were rough sleeping while the majority were in supported/temporary housing.
• All the participants were also engaging with other health related support services for e.g. drugs / alcohol.

Part of the learning was to ensure that participants were provided with regular updates. We did this through way of texts, emails and paper copies sent to an address of their choice and services they were using.

Details of this project are included in this CRN findings document.

LEAF was recently involved in the launch of a major new study looking at the best ways to support people who are homeless after leaving hospital. In Oxfordshire, people are provided with short term housing and support in the community. This is called step-down. LEAF members contacted people after they left the step-down to see what they thought about the service. This survey information was fed into the evaluation report and local commissioners commented that this was vital in supporting the case for the future funding of these services.

LEAF supported Steph Mulrine from Newcastle University with gaining lived experience interviews around the Thames Valley area looking at healthcare within police custody. Here is an update on what will happen next.

The Thames Valley RESTART pilot programme was initially funded by the Ministry of Justice for 12 months followed by the Police and Crime Commissioner. It is an active project which will now continue until October 2024, following which the findings will be fully evaluated and reported on. Its aims were to develop solutions to some of the key challenges faced by people leaving prison including access to accommodation, support, and employment opportunities, and to drive systemic change in order to reduce re-offending.

Members of LEAF participated in a pre-recorded session on barriers to accessing housing when leaving prison, along with barriers they faced when looking into voluntary and paid work after being released from prison or having a criminal record. The videos were used at a training event called Employment and Employability. The audience was made up of the OPCC, frontline RESTART team and their host organisations, Thames Valley Police, DWP, HMPPS, University of Oxford and employers.

The RESTART programme also offered free learning to the LEAF members through Aneemo. Over 50% of the LEAF members completed the free training sessions which covered RESTART enhanced learning, rough sleeper and mental health awareness, improving access to services for clients experiencing multiple disadvantages and co-occurring conditions plus PIE and TIC live workshop training recording. Aneemo’s aim was to provide CPD accredited video-based online training specifically developed to enhance cross-sector agencies' work developing PIE and TIC.

The ‘LEAF Festival of Feedback’ was designed by members of the LEAF in Oxford with the support of the Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI). The purpose of the Festival was to gather feedback from people experiencing homelessness and people working in frontline roles within the Alliance services who form most of the homelessness services within Oxfordshire. LEAF members felt that there was a need to gather feedback on the working of the local homelessness system as a whole to build an understanding of how the collaborative approach of the Alliance was working.


The festival took place over two days on the 11th and 12th July 2023. People experiencing homelessness were invited to attend on the first day and frontline practitioners were invited to attend on the second day. Over the course of the event 28 people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity and 16 frontline practitioners attended the festival and participated in the feedback activities. The feedback gathered through all the activities was analysed by members of the CHI staff team resulting in the report on Learning from LEAF’s Festival of Feedback.

OHM commissioned LEAF to look at why some people may or may not want to move out of Oxford City. Questionnaires were designed and completed by LEAF. LEAF have now completed the findings which can be read in the downloadable study report. See also the OHM website for more details.

Between November 2022 and February 2023, Homeless Link facilitated a 4-part Community of Practice (CoP) series on ‘involving & recruiting people with lived experience’ that LEAF participated in. The purpose of the series was to delve deeper into how we recruit, involve, offer volunteering opportunities, and respectfully pay people with lived experience. The sessions provided a safe place for organisations across England to reflect, build relationships, share best practice, and ultimately create change.

See the downloadable report and the Homeless Link website for more details. These outline the key findings and learning from discussions held across the CoP series. They also provides links to existing toolkits and guidance for further reading and exploration.