Established 2005 Registered Charity No. 1110656

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May 01 2025
A leafy scene captured by Mat Amp © Mat Amp A leafy scene captured by Mat Amp © Mat Amp

We are all deserving of support and helpful services, no matter how resilient and tough we are. By Mat Amp

If you want to know what it means to be truly resilient, then go and live on the streets or in a homeless hostel. Try and cope with mental health issues or battle addiction when you don’t have a safe and secure place to call home. 

Until it happened to me, I had very little personal experience of what it is like to live without the basic resources that are part and parcel of having a home. 

Saying that, I had seen other people dealing with acute poverty. At the age of eight I moved to Lagos, Nigeria – the biggest and busiest black city in the world – from the parochial market town of Hereford. It was in Nigeria where I discovered the true meaning of the word resilience. Many people there struggle to survive, with no access to social security and very little in the way of an effective or affordable healthcare system. 

When I was expelled from school for the third time, at the age of 15, my dad made me get a job so that I wasn’t sitting around the house doing jack shit. That was how I found myself welding the joins on oil tankers under a corrugated metal roof for fuck all squared a month. The intense humidity could be brutal and I only made the mistake of turning up for work with a hangover once. It was an apprenticeship, so I was only working for four hours a day, but it felt like 10. And the amount people were earning stunned me. I couldn’t understand how the hell people were supporting their families on the amount they were getting paid.   

In Nigeria I saw a lot of people struggle hard day-to-day. There is a palpable buzz in the air in Lagos, which gives the city an atmosphere like nowhere else. People there are incredibly resilient, and they have to be, just to survive. 

The stigma around people who have experienced homelessness can sometimes include the view that we are to be pitied because we are not capable of keeping a roof over our own heads. The Daily Mail-reading moral majority have a tendency to load any kindness they may deem us worthy of with a brand of self-righteous judgement, designed to give themselves an ‘aren’t we good people for giving to this pitiful mob’ award. 

But when you’ve had to struggle just to fill your stomach or get a decent night’s sleep, when you’ve had to cope with the stress and anxiety of having to survive on the street, it can give you a kind of resilience.

This is quote from a bit of a wanky intellectual paper, but you get the point:

“The findings revealed that resiliency in homelessness is an inherent quality and a developed response shaped by the interplay of innate capacities and environmental challenges. It uncovered a need to reassess societal value judgements. Resiliency among people without housing suggests strengths that go unrecognised by conventional measures.” – From Resiliency in Persons Experiencing Homelessness: A Concept Analysis Using the Evolutionary Framework, written by Christian Ketel and Samereh Abdoli. 

In other words, having to cope with challenging shit in difficult circumstances gives us the ability to deal with things in a way that goes largely unnoticed and unmeasured. 

Somewhere deep down in my subconscious I must have told myself that the type of homeless services I hated were designed to engage “the typical homeless type of person”. I used to go into homeless services thinking “I don’t belong here…” but now I realise that nobody does. I realise that these type of services aren’t really designed for anybody. In other words, they aren’t fit for purpose if that purpose is to help people to recover from homelessness. 

The type of services I’m talking about are places where the staff are burnt out, everything is broken and scabby looking and people look like they’re living in a country that is going through a civil war. Confronted with this type of service, we understandably shut down, going into ourselves in order to shut out the challenging reality we are confronted with.  

For the last six months I’ve been visiting services as an inreach worker. One of the boroughs we work in is Westminster, a place that is notorious for these type of services. I won’t mention names but one of the services we go to has improved dramatically over the past six months. It has installed several computers and employed a few health professionals to deliver podiatry, homeopathy and dental support. Previously, staff tended to remain behind their glass petition in the hallway, but recently there has always been someone ‘on the floor’ with us. The impact has been dramatic. When I started working there the atmosphere crackled with hopelessness. It wasn’t conducive to open communication, especially when you’re encouraging people to talk about their health issues. Now people generally greet us with a smile and are far more open to talking with us about accessing primary health care. 

I can remember how it felt to walk into a service that feels like it has given up on all hope of trying to help you in the long-term. At the time I already felt hopeless and ashamed and it exacerbated those feelings. At some point I started to think that the shame I felt over finding myself homeless was driven by the fact that somewhere deep down inside, I must have judged people for being homeless. If I hadn’t, in some shape or form, have looked down on people experiencing homelessness, why the fuck would I be ashamed of being homeless myself?

But I have realised that the shame and hopelessness I felt wasn’t just the result of my own preconceived prejudice. It is difficult to have any faith in yourself when the services you have to use just to survive give you the impression that society has given up on you. 

What I have learned over the past 15 years from being homeless myself and working for a charity that is fuelled by our voice – the voice of those with experience of the issues we are talking about – is that I am not different, but I am unique. We all are. None of us end up homeless because we deserve it and none of us are ‘the type’ of people who end up homeless. We may have issues in common, but we are all individuals with our own stories and none of us deserve to be homeless.

No matter what anybody tells us, we are individuals with our own stories and our resilience means that they are stories that cannot be erased.

< Optimism as resilience
February – March 2026 : Progress

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