St Pat’s team saw that the challenge of ending homelessness was changing.

St Patrick’s Community Support Centre – St Pat’s – has been working with people at risk of or experiencing homelessness in the South Metropolitan region of Perth for over fifty years. The organisation, which began with Brother Hannick giving out soup and sandwiches from the veranda of St Patrick’s Basilica in Fremantle, has grown to become a leading provider of support services and community housing. St Pat’s is driven by a clear aim – to end chronic homelessness

But in recent years, the organisation has been witnessing the nature and scale of homelessness changing rapidly, with the number of rough sleepers in WA more than doubling between 2016 and 2021. Families and young people are increasingly among those unable to find secure housing. Their response: adopting tenets of the evidence based Housing First approach, and seeking to significantly grow their offer of innovative housing.

Innovation Unit began collaborating with St Pat’s in 2021 to develop a Strategic Service Design to give shape to those ambitions. Since then, our working relationship has encompassed multiple projects from the design of pilot programs and one-off learning sessions to large-scale strategic planning, culminating in an articulation of “Future St Pat’s” and a detailed roadmap of how to get there.

Co-design processes enabled new kinds of relationships to grow.

For St Pat’s to shape its future, to design services which would complement its ambition for ending homelessness, everyone needed to do the shaping: staff, clients, volunteers and leadership. Innovation Unit facilitated co-design processes to reimagine services and systems with the people who experience them at the centre. Designing together not only yielded new ideas, these engagements have been important steps in longer journeys for the organisation. They have involved building new relationships with people who have a lived experience of homelessness and of St Pat’s services. This, in turn, has provided the foundations for more strategic work to enable the organisation to make lived experience a powerful driver of Future St Pat’s. 

Through this relational work, St Pat’s has been able to reconsider services fundamental to its identity. Their Fremantle Day Centre, which embodies their strongly held value of hospitality, is being reimagined in a new space as an Engagement Hub to open later this year, a calmer, more welcoming space for everyone (especially families and young people who may have found the previous space confronting ), with intentional relationships and integrations that connect people to the services and support they need.

Change at St Pat’s is becoming deeply rooted and embedded

It is one thing to have bold new ideas and another to embed them in the organisation long term – this demands thoughtful groundwork to create enabling conditions. The team had to think about how to communicate about potential change both inside and outside the organisation, how changes would be resourced, and how to develop people to make changes possible and sustainable. As a result, the organisation now has a roadmap which includes every action needed to make St Pat’s ready to realise its plans for the future across multiple streams of activity. This includes their Aboriginal-led service Djenabidet Kaleep which also will provide an essential cultural lens for the whole organisation to their outreach work through HEART.

While Innovation Unit’s work with St Pat’s could be considered a series of separate projects, the reality has been one of walking alongside St Pat’s through this vital, transformative time for this expanding organisation. We learned what was so important:

• The depth of the trusted relationships between Innovation Unit and St Pat’s that cultivated over time
• The breadth of relationships that existed between multiple Innovation Unit team members and St Pat’s staff from those working on-the-ground to leadership

We can see this as an example of “scaling deep”: where lasting change can happen through building connections in the context and “the slow and steady work of deepening relationships”. (Fraser, 2023) It has been a privilege to be in this work with St Pat’s.