In August 2025, the City of Darebin, in partnership with Launch Housing and local housing, homelessness, health, and community services, proudly commenced Darebin Zero: Ending Homelessness Together. This initiative takes a place-based collective impact approach to significantly reduce rough sleeping within the local community by connecting directly with individuals and enrolling them onto the local ‘By Name List’ (BNL). This allows for a tailored, client-centred service response.

Collaboration at the core

Darebin Zero is undertaken in partnership with:

• Darebin City Council
• Merri Outreach Support Service
• Haven Home Safe
• Launch Housing
• Darebin Information, Volunteer and Response Service (DIVRS)
• Northern Health
• Your Community Health
• Victoria Police

This partnership enables effective service coordination essential for the project’s growth and success. These services directly support the community in Darebin.

Project goals

The goal of Darebin Zero is to achieve Functional Zero homelessness. This will be reached when the number of people entering and experiencing rough sleeping homelessness within a month is less than the average monthly placement rate into long-term housing, or three. Once achieved it must be sustained and any future experiences of rough sleeping homelessness in Darebin are brief, rare and once-off. This will be when the housing and support resources required to end homelessness are efficiently coordinated and sufficient to meet the needs of all people who sleep and live in the municipality.

Continuous improvement

Darebin Zero is committed to continuous improvement, underscored by a year-long Data Governance project enhancing capabilities in data handling and privacy, in compliance with the latest guidelines from the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner.

How are we going?

In February 2025 Darebin City Council met with local services to hear from local services about the successes and challenges that come with working with people rough sleeping. It was identified in that roundtable that services wanted to work more collaboratively together to provide comprehensive wrap around support, however required additional assistance to drive this change. Darebin Zero launched in August 2025. The latest data from the BNL illustrates the scale of rough sleeping homelessness in Darebin. It shows how people’s circumstances change over time as they connect to the services in the project. The data shows the change in living situations that happen over time and movement as people travel on a pathway out of homelessness.

Sleeping rough and actively homeless

People are added onto the BNL when we meet them and they are sleeping rough. This means that they are in an unsheltered living situation, a car or an abandoned building or dwelling unfit for human habitation, eg a ‘squat’. When added they become ‘active’ on the BNL. This chart shows the ‘active’ number since the project started. By showing the number of people who remain sleeping rough we can see that people connected to the project gradually move into different living situations. (CHART COMING SOON)

Actively homeless and changes in living situations

Most people prefer not to sleep rough and move between different living situations as their circumstances change. The figure below shows this change as people connect to the services in the project. The chart shows that some people move into safer forms of sheltered emergency accommodation such as hotels, motels, or specialist crisis accommodations, or into other forms of temporary housing including Transitional housing (THM) or Head Lease housing. They also move into community rooming houses and other forms of living with others which may have greater security of tenure but remain forms of homelessness. These are not final housing outcomes and for that reason people remain ‘active’ even though their living situations may have improved. People could live in these for several years before an offer of social housing is finally made.

The most important reason people stay on the list and don't move into safe and secure homes is that there simply aren't enough homes in Victoria that people on low incomes can afford. If 10 homes are available and 50 people need homes, 40 people are going to remain without a home, no matter how hard everyone tries to house them. Based on current estimates and in agreement with Council to Homeless Persons, we know that Victoria needs to build at least 6,000 homes every year for the next decade to meet current and expected future demand.

(CHART COMING SOON)

Partners

• Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH)
• Homes Victoria
• Department of Justice and Community Safety (DoJ)

• Andrew McDougall & Frances Ilyine Foundation  
• Ballarat Foundation
• Collier Charitable Trust
• Creswick Woolen Mills (300 Blankets)
• Erdi Foundation
• Percy Baxter Charitable Trust 
• The Blueshore Charitable Trust 
• The Bowden Marstan Foundation 
• The Jack Brockoff Foundation
• William Angliss Charitable Fund
• Many generous individual donors