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 new 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. Functional Zero is reached when the number of people experiencing rough sleeping within a month is fewer than those placed into long-term housing. Our aim is to ensure that any incidence of homelessness is brief, rare, and non-recurring, facilitated by adequate and efficiently coordinated housing and support resources.
Continuous improvement
Darebin Zero is committed to continuous improvement, underscored by a year-long Data Governance project enhancing our 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 of 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. With our partners we are building our BNL data, and engaging with the rough sleepers in the area to work towards finding safe and suitable housing options.
Sleeping rough and actively homeless
People are added to the BNL when we meet them, and they are sleeping rough. This means that they are in an unsheltered living situation, in a car or staying in an abandoned building that we call a ‘squat’. When they are added they become active on the BNL.
Actively homeless and changes in living situations
People don’t usually stay sleeping rough but move between different living situations as their circumstances change. The figure below shows this change over time as people become connected to the network of services that make up 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 quality pathways out of homelessness such as Transitional (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 their final housing outcomes and for that reason people remain ‘active’ even though their living situations have improved significantly. People may live in these for several years before an offer of social housing is finally made.
A key 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.
Advance to Zero projects are made possible through the Victorian Government, local governments and the generous philanthropic support of:
- Collier Charitable Fund
- Estate of the late Ernest Lonsdale Brown
- Ethel Paxton Trust Fund
- Fred J Cato Charitable Fund
- Gandel Foundation
- Miss M K A Bell Memorial Fund
- Oliver-Affleck Fund
- Percy Baxter Charitable Trust
- Perpetual Foundation – The Hutchinson Endowment
- Rowe Family Foundation
- The Blueshore Charitable Trust, managed by Australian Philanthropic Services
- The Bowden Marstan Foundation
- The Jack Brockhoff Foundation
- The John Robertson Grigor & Mrs Eva McKenzie Bequest Account Discretionary Trust
- The Ross Trust
- The William Angliss Charitable Fund
- Zig Inge Foundation