In December 2024, Mornington Peninsula Shire council in partnership with their neighbouring Frankston Zero project, Launch Housing and the Salvation Army, proudly launched Mornington Peninsula Zero. This new initiative takes a place-based collective impact approach to significantly reduce rough sleeping within the region by connecting directly with people sleeping rough and enrolling them onto the local ‘By Name List’ (BNL). This is the foundation that allows for a tailored, client-centred service response.
Collaboration at the Core
Mornington Peninsula Zero is spearheaded by the Mornington Peninsula Shire Council, Launch Housing, and the Salvation Army. Partners in the project include
- Southern Peninsula Community Support
- Peninsula Health
- Wintringham
- Peninsula Community Legal Centre
- Mornington Community Support Centre
- Bolton Clarke
- Westernport Community Support Service
- Lighthouse Foundation.
These partnerships enable effective service coordination essential for the project’s growth and success.
Project Goals
The goal of Mornington Peninsula 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.
How are we going?
Homelessness is ended when people move into safe, sustainable, long-term housing of their choice. This includes public or community housing or private rental that meets an acceptable minimum standard of a self-contained dwelling with its own kitchen and bathroom facilities. The person must have security of tenure evidenced by a signed tenancy agreement. Long-term housing includes aged care and may include long-term special residential services. In time the high-level outcomes that Mornington Peninsula Zero and the coordinated service system it operates within will achieve will be shown below.
Please check back soon for this monthly data for Mornington Peninsula Shire.
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, in a car or staying in an abandoned building that we call a ‘squat’. When they are added they become active on the BNL. This chart will show the active number of people since the project started and how people who are connected to the project gradually move out of sleeping rough, which with time be picked up in the figure further below.
Please check back soon for this monthly data for Mornington Peninsula Shire.
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.
Please check back soon for this monthly data for Mornington Peninsula Shire.
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