Ending Women's Homelessness

Homeless Link has been awarded £2 million by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), from the Homelessness strand of the Tampon Tax Fund, to deliver onward grants to charities working with women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in England. The programme will open for first stage submissions at the end of June 2019.

What we will fund

Grants will fund work that increases gender-informed services and cross-sector working, transforming the support of women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Projects will deliver one or more of these outcomes:  

  • Increase in number of services offering gender-informed support
  • Increased engagement from services with women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness
  • Reduction in women sleeping rough
  • Increase in number of staff skilled to support women
  • Increase in number of staff skilled to work with people facing multiple disadvantage
  • Increase in services working with Local Authorities as part of homelessness and rough sleeping strategies.

We’re keen to see applications from both homelessness and women’s charities; cross-sector collaborations that make best use of expertise to benefit women accessing services; and the involvement of women with lived experience in project design and/or delivery.

Projects might, for example:

  • Increase capacity for women-only provision
  • Create women-only spaces and specialist support in mixed services
  • Develop partnerships between the women’s and homelessness sectors
  • Increase opportunities for the co-location of services
  • Identify prevention opportunities with women who are hidden homeless
  • Up-skill homelessness staff to work with issues such as domestic abuse
  • Up-skill women’s sector staff to work with people facing multiple disadvantage
  • Enable homelessness and women’s sectors to contribute to the implementation of Local Authority strategies
  • Improve pathways into services to reduce the number of women sleeping rough
  • Pilot or embed targeted interventions for under-represented groups of women such as BAME, youth, LGBTQI+, women with offending histories, and women with no recourse to public funds (NRPF).

This is not a definitive list – projects should be responsive to their local context and to the needs of women who will be accessing funded services.

Key dates

The Ending Women’s Homelessness programme will launch at the end of June 2019, with grants awarded Oct-Nov 2019 for project delivery to start between Oct-Dec 2019. Grant-funded activity can continue until March 2021.

First stage Expressions of Interest (EOI) will be accepted during July, with rolling assessments. Only applicants successful at EOI stage will be given access to an online application portal for the full application.

We will publish full details of the process and criteria when the programme launches at the end of June.

Available grants

There are two strands, with awards totaling £1.85m:

  • Large grants of up to £100,000 – open to all charities, deadline August
  • Small grants of up to £30,000 – open to charities with turnover of less than £2 million, deadline September

We expect to make around 15 large and 10 small grants.

Charities can only make one application, but may be named as a partner on additional applications, as long as there is no duplication of activity between the proposals.

How to apply

Full criteria and process will be published at the end of June, along with a link to the Expression of Interest that will be available on this web page.

Please note that we are unable to respond to enquiries about individual applications until the programme has launched. No applications will be accepted by email or in hard copy.

If you have general questions about the programme please email: fund@homelesslink.org.uk and we will compile a list of FAQ for this webpage.

Grants Panel

Final decisions on grant awards will be made by a Grants Panel consisting of women from the homelessness and women’s sector, and women with lived experience of homelessness. Further details to follow.

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