Project Bag People

The purpose of project Bag People is to carry out practical, social street work in the Copenhagen area, to help homeless people with mental illnesses. Outreach and outgoing support, contact and caring activities are carried out on a continuous basis, at different times during the day and night, and are done by two regular project employees and a pedagogue trainee. The target group is people who for one reason or another have lost contact with the official social security system and/or have lost their personal network.

Project Bag People is trying to help homeless people with mental illnesses. Often they do not have any mentionable addictions. Many of them do not have a personal network and are therefore very lonely and completely isolated. Most of them do not recognise that they are mentally ill, and they seldom seek help through the social security or health system. They have also lost confidence in the surrounding society and have either no contact or little contact with the established system.

According to our counts, our contact group is a constant 30-50 individuals. Mental illness is a common denominator for this group, but the nature of their conditions varies considerably. project Bag People makes a distinction between outreach and outgoing work. Outreach activities focus on finding and establishing contact and trust to the target group, that is characterised by being particularly difficult to reach, since they strongly reject approaches and personal contact; all contact is therefore made slowly and at each homeless person’s own pace. Our outgoing activities are focussed on maintaining contact with each homeless person, for instance by meeting them at agreed dates and times for a cup of coffee at a café.

In the project, we try to give assistance based on needs as they are expressed by the individual homeless person. This is part of the formula for establishing a trusting, close and solidary contact between the homeless person and the street worker. Our methods are thus characterised by contact, presence, trust and care – and a cup of coffee, a meal or a new jacket are excellent tools for establishing just that.

The work is process-oriented, and street workers approach each contact with professionalism, personal convictions and commitment. Our basic goal is to meet each person on his or her own terms, without strategies and action plans. This approach is fundamental in our work, as this is our way of establishing contact and trust. We do, however, document our work through journals, which all of street workers keep. Here they note down who they find in the streets, what sort of help they give, and how many contacts they have been able to make throughout a period.

In other words, the work carried out in project Bag People is experimental, and project staff continuously reflect on the moral and ethical dilemmas they encounter constantly in this work. It is fundamental to the project that the street workers show respect for each homeless person they meet in all activities, and that they always make sure that each person receives help without compromising his or her personal dignity.

In order to be able to offer correct help it is necessary to work across systems. In project Bag People we are working together with both the public social security system and other non-governmental organisations in Copenhagen, other Danish cities and cities outside of Denmark. Some of the homeless in the project are not Danish citizens, and sometimes it becomes necessary to co-operate with authorities in neighbouring countries.

It is not unusual that private people contact projekt UDENFOR to tell us that they have spotted a homeless person. Commitment and help from the surrounding society is very important to us: it helps us find homeless individuals whom we might otherwise not have found.

Project Bag People is a street project. However, it is also important for projekt UDENFOR to spread the knowledge we have compiled on the issue of homelessness to other parts of society. We therefore arrange frequent meetings at our address, at pedagogue colleges, nursing schools and other places where we present our working methods. You can easily order a presentation or lecture from one of our staff on the work we do in the project.

Project Bag People has been the core activity in projekt UDENFOR since we began our activities in 1997, and our outreach and outgoing work aimed at homeless people with mental illnesses will continue to be our main focus until the established social security system becomes able and willing to take over the task.

You are welcome to order a presentation or lecture on the work we do in project Bag People.

If you have specific questions and would like to know more about the project, you are welcome to contact our project officers Mr Bo Heide-Jochimsen (email: bj@udenfor.dk) or Ms Ann Dorthe (email: adl@udenfor.dk)