The challenge
Starting a business is hard. Starting a social enterprise that requires local authority teams to shift mindset about the way they tackle homelessness is doubly hard. Now throw in the need for a cast-iron technical build.
Architect Chris Hildrey came up with his innovative idea for tackling an important element of the homelessness issue while working as a Designer in Residence at the Design Museum. His big leap was the realisation that today, our addresses – our home addresses – are de facto forms of ID. Without a reliable address, people fall through the cracks exactly at the moment they need the most help.
Instead of trying to physically house people, Chris saw that providing a stand-in address could enable many to access vital services that were otherwise closed to them because of their homelessness – a pragmatic solution at a time when local authorities are facing increasing challenges and decreasing budgets. With such an address, people could take the first steps to lifting themselves out of homelessness.
The idea for ProxyAddress was born. But it needed an engine room to be built from scratch. An engine room with an extremely secure database, robust enough, reliable enough and user-friendly enough to win the trust of local authorities, regulatory bodies, banks and vulnerable end users.
The proposition
Chris was raising funding, and when he presented his idea to us, we believed in it immediately, and felt we could make a difference. So, we committed to supporting as much as possible.
As a business with a strong social conscience, we’re often frustrated by finding that charity or not-for-profit projects aren’t right for us.
When we met Chris, we knew we could help him to prioritise and rationalise the technical side of the business, winning him the most bang for his buck, as those bucks came in. Plus, we could use our long experience with securing sensitive data – and our relevant certifications – to build it with the virtual steel walls he’d need to satisfy those demanding stakeholders.
When he secured his first Innovate UK grant for ProxyAddress, we match-funded it, providing discounted developer time and free QA and project management to get the ball rolling with a pilot application.
Following that initial pilot, Chris won further funding and we were happy to provide more discounted work on the next steps.
The project journey
As an architect, Chris is trained to understand how communities – and cities – work. But his dismay at seeing the human cost of austerity all around him was compounded by frustration that architects are involved too far down the housing policy line to have any real impact on addressing these problems.
While homelessness might trigger images of rough sleepers, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Hostel accommodation, halfway houses, sofa surfing and the like can all keep people off the streets but they still lack a permanent address – or have one that comes with a stigma.
Chris’s abstract thinking led him to a breakthrough: most of the time, when you use your address, you’re not putting it on an envelope, you’re putting it on a form. It’s not simply a description of a location – without proof of address, you don’t have proof of identity. And without proof of identity comes a whole heap of problems.
Changing our ‘computer says no’ bureaucratic system is the obvious and ideal solution, but we all know how impenetrable that forest can be. And people struggling right now don’t have time for politicians and bureaucrats to argue about policy change.
Instead, ProxyAddress provides a pragmatic way of providing that proof of address, which gives the system what it wants and allows the end user – and everyone trying to help them – to get on with the job.
A ProxyAddress acts as a gateway between the user and the world. For others, it looks like a stable address; for the user, it provides privacy, security, and removes the outward stigma of homelessness.
By duplicating the address data of existing empty properties and assigning them to those in need, councils are able to tie the information to the person, not a place.
A huge part of the ProxyAddress mission is collaboration across all sectors and at different levels within organisations. But ultimately, it’s pinned together by this digital element.
As Chris says: “Our application requires a lot of system design. We have to make sure it’s easy to use for the end users, easy to use for local councils and that it’s robust and trustable.
“We can’t have someone using our service and suddenly they find they can’t access the doctor or their bank because we’ve got downtime.
“The core spine is how we move from floating ideas of information to an actionable interactive interface. And to do it in such a way that it is so robust that it can be trusted by people who, for very good reason, might have trouble trusting things.”
Naturally for an architect, designing the system was close to Chris’s heart, so we collaborated closely.
“It’s about investing the time at the outset, to make sure it’s good enough for the people who need to use it,” he says. “Whether it’s the physical built environment or intangible systems and software, you imbue your design with consideration for who’s going to use it. To be successful, it has to be frictionless and enjoyable.”
For example, with users likely to be moving around temporary accommodation, it’s important that they can update their details and postal delivery/collection point online, with a smartphone, or via SMS text. Or, because having a ProxyAddress means users can register for membership of the local library, they’re able to access public computers to do this.
Once we’d built an initial version of the application, Chris was able to use it as part of a first pilot, to deal with the biggest red flag for potential partners: proving the concept and system is anti-fraud compliant.
This pilot was overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority and carried out with the participation of ProxyAddress partners, including banks such as Monzo and Barclays, and charities including Crisis.
With lots of resulting analysis, iteration and learning, we’ve now created a comprehensive working model, and the project team is gearing up for a second pilot to demonstrate the viability of ProxyAddress at a managed scale, with multiple locations, involving multiple services. It will increase the number of people using the system but doing so in such a way that it’s not over-stretching capabilities.
“We have had to be very careful in the way we put things together, so we can easily isolate anything that needs iteration,” says Chris. “Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘move fast and break things’ mantra isn’t something you can do when you’re working with vulnerable people. Our own mantra is ‘move slowly and fix things’; it requires a bit of patience.”
The impact
The impact of the first pilot was easily quantifiable. Because the checks were so rigorous, the ProxyAddress team kept the numbers low, with 49 people taking part.
At the end of the six-month trial, 47 of those were no longer homeless.
As Chris says: “With local authorities constantly being asked to do more for less, we need to find ways to use what we have – not just in the physical realm but also in terms of information. ProxyAddress is able to use address information in a way that connects it with other things – and suddenly we can make an impact.”
The longer-term impact remains to be seen but our belief in the idea has never wavered, and we’re excited to be involved in such a ground-breaking project.
You can help us to bring stability and support to those facing homelessness by donating here.
