Project Foreign Rough Sleepers

In June 2010 projekt UDENFOR started a 3-year project in order to remedy the immediate needs among the most vulnerable homeless foreigners, to uncover their particular conditions, and to communicate the gathered knowledge and experience to the operators and interested parties both at the national and international level.

The project is aimed at the most exposed and marginalised homeless foreigners in Copenhagen, those who often suffer from a mental disease or abuse who are unable to take care of their own lives but who need an acute action to remedy their most basic needs.

The homeless foreigners have no access to help from the public system, among these health benefits (apart from the most acute), treatment against abuse, help from the locally employed street-level co-workers and access to publicly financed shelters and night drop-in shelters.

At the same time those of the homeless who are EU-citizens cannot be sent back home immediately or deported as they are protected by the EU legislation. Thus they have ended up in a vacuum in which they are left to themselves, and many of them sleep outside the whole year round. The most marginalised within the group live in isolation in the street and are unable to look for help elsewhere. This is the group towards which the rough sleepers’ project is directed.

Through an investigative action of an acute and supportive character we try to remedy the most urgent problems of the homeless. Problems which can be of a social, legal or health – related character.

At the same time there is a lack of knowledge concerning the new groups of homeless foreigners.

Why have they come here? What kind of problems have they got? How can they be helped to get on with their lives? There is also a need of clarification concerning their rights according to respectively Danish and EU legislation, the human rights conventions. This lack of knowledge leads to prejudices and generalisations as to the picture of foreign homeless people based on the most visible from the group, those who beg and steal, etc, rather than on a factual and solid knowledge. This contributes to worsening the living conditions of the homeless foreigners.

Therefore the objective of the rough sleepers’ project is also to elucidate and describe the homeless people’s conditions through a gathering and communication of knowledge about their existence and living conditions.

The project is to be financed through private means and since fundraising for the project is being worked upon at the moment, the project is accordingly in a pilot period.