The Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI) was founded in 2018, establishing itself as an independent entity having been incubated within Crisis (one of the UK's largest homelessness charities), and joining the What Works Council (the grouping of What Works Centres recognised by the UK Cabinet Office) in 2019.

The centre's objective is simple – to create a society in which any experience of homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurring. Despite substantial reductions in homelessness, and in particular rough sleeping in the first part of the 21st century, rates have increased in the UK in recent years.

Homelessness is a complex phenomenon with infrastructural, economic and social causes and outcomes. Although many people's mental image of homelessness is the rough sleeper or the Big Issue seller (a magazine sold on the street by the homeless or others marginalised in some way), many people who are homeless live in temporary, unstable or unsuitable accommodation, and are less at the forefront of the minds of both policy makers and the public.

To ensure that our work is aligned with our mission, we work within the SHARE Framework that identifies five focus areas that offer the best chance of driving significant change in ending homelessness. This stands for:

Each element of the framework has an important part to play in ending homelessness, and each needs its own evidence base. Naturally, some of these elements already have better evidence than others – for example housing system, for which we have identified 17 indicators – contrasting with smart policy with only two. Given this disparity, our role is to collate the evidence that is available, and to do all we can to generate new evidence in partnership with delivery organisations and evaluators.

For the remainder of this challenge, we will consider our journey as an organisation – what we have learned, where we have succeeded and where we are going. First, it is helpful to consider how CHI differs from many of our sister What Works Centres.