Anyone working in homelessness services in Australia right now will tell you the same thing: the system is under more pressure than it has been in years. Rents keep climbing, waitlists for social housing keep growing, and more people are falling through gaps that used to have a safety net underneath them. For people who are sleeping rough or moving in and out of homelessness for long stretches, that pressure often means fewer places to turn and less patience left for services that expect them to come in, fill out forms, and wait.
A system already under strain
The numbers tell part of the story. More than one in three low-income renters, 43%, were experiencing rental stress and at risk of homelessness in 2024-25, even while receiving Commonwealth Rent Assistance. That's not a fringe issue; it's a large share of the people services are supposed to be able to help before things get worse. At the same time, Homelessness Australia's analysis found more than 56,000 people who needed crisis or longer-term accommodation in the past year could not get help, simply because there wasn't enough housing available to offer them. When the front door of the system is this congested, it's little wonder that people with the most complex needs often end up furthest from support.
Why some people disengage from standard services
It's tempting to assume that anyone who is sleeping rough would take help if it were offered. In reality, many people have already tried the standard pathways, sometimes more than once, and had experiences that left them wary. A missed appointment, a service that couldn't meet their needs, a system that felt more concerned with eligibility criteria than with them as a person, any of these can be enough to make someone stop trying. Add in trauma, mental health challenges, family breakdown, or years of being moved from one waitlist to another, and it makes sense that trust in formal services can wear thin. This isn't a character flaw or a failure to engage. It's a rational response to a system that hasn't always worked for them.
Productivity Commission data shows persistent homelessness, meaning someone has been without a home for more than seven months within a two-year period, rose to 37,779 people in 2023-24, up from 29,500 in 2018-19. That's a 28% increase in five years. These are the people most likely to have disengaged from mainstream services altogether, and they are exactly who assertive outreach is designed to reach.
Homelessness Action Now
Homelessness Week 2026 ran from 3 to 9 August under the theme "Homelessness Action Now," a deliberate shift away from simply raising awareness and toward calling for practical, funded action. It's a fitting frame for where things stand. Awareness of the housing crisis is not in short supply. What's needed now is investment in the kinds of support that actually reach people who have stopped engaging with formal systems, rather than more services that wait for people to walk through the door.
What assertive outreach actually looks like
Assertive outreach flips the usual service model. Instead of expecting someone to attend an office, book an appointment, or navigate a phone system, support workers go to where the person actually is, a park, a car, a friend's couch, a rooming house, and meet them there, on their terms. The first visits might not involve any formal "intervention" at all. They might just be a conversation, a check-in, a consistent face turning up again and again until trust starts to build.
That consistency is the whole point. People who have been let down by services before need to see, over time, that a worker will keep showing up whether or not they're ready to accept help that day. Once that trust exists, outreach workers can start connecting someone to housing options, health services, income support, or other practical next steps, but always at the person's pace rather than on a service's timeline or paperwork deadline.
Why this approach works for the hardest-to-reach cases
Assertive outreach is widely recognised as the evidence-based approach for engaging people experiencing persistent homelessness who have disengaged from standard service pathways. It works because it removes the barriers that stop people from seeking help in the first place, the forms, the waiting rooms, the requirement to explain your situation to a stranger before you've even decided you trust them. By building a relationship first and offering support second, outreach workers can reach people that office-based services simply never see.
Nhanya's Assertive Outreach and Stabilisation service
This is the model behind Nhanya's Assertive Outreach and Stabilisation service. Our support workers go to where people are, rather than waiting for them to come in, and build relationships over time with people who have often been disengaged from formal systems for years. From there, we work alongside people to connect them with practical next steps, including our Accommodation Support service, which helps with navigating housing options, applications, tenancy transitions and NDIS-related accommodation pathways, as well as broader advocacy and service navigation support. For people with NDIS plans, we can also connect them with Support Coordination or Specialist Support Coordination to help make sense of what's available to them.
None of this means we run crisis shelters or claim to single-handedly resolve rough sleeping, no single organisation can do that in the current housing environment. What we can do is stay engaged with people long enough, and consistently enough, that when an opportunity for stable housing or support does open up, they have someone in their corner who already knows them and can help them take it.
A shared responsibility
Fixing the housing shortage behind Australia's homelessness figures will take sustained investment well beyond what any community organisation can deliver alone. But assertive outreach shows that in the meantime, the people who are hardest to reach are not a lost cause. They're often just waiting for someone to keep showing up.
If you'd like to know more about Nhanya's Assertive Outreach and Stabilisation service or make a referral, get in touch via nhanya.org.au/contact or call us on 03 8595 9012.
You can also support this work directly by making a tax-deductible donation or volunteering your time.