Illustrations and community forums are being used to transform Victorians' perceptions of homelessness, as an exhibition examining female homelessness travels around Victoria with people with lived experience addressing homelessness in each local area on the tour.
The illustrations bring the true stories of three women to life, showing how they became homeless, each at different stages of life. The illustrator, local Melbourne artist Jo Waite, has also experienced housing insecurity herself.
The exhibition "Walk in Her Shoes" opened in Casey in Melbourne this week, with a community forum including Minister for Housing Harriet Shing and Opposition Leader Brad Battin.
It comes as new data released by Council to Homeless Persons last week showed the Victorian Government spends less than $400 per person in the population annually on social housing and homelessness support, even as the state's housing emergency continues to worsen.
"This is a creative, yet raw way to understand what homelessness really looks like. Many people associate homelessness with men sleeping rough. But statistically, most people facing homelessness are women, and the majority of them are leaving abusive or unsafe situations," Acting CEO of Council to Homeless Persons Lucas Testro said.
"These artworks are a haunting glimpse of how women and girls are being let down so badly by Victoria's current lack of social housing and homelessness support. And they're a powerful reminder that homelessness is not a failure of people. It's a failure of systems."
Council to Homelessness Persons has been calling on the state government to commit to building at least 4,000 new social homes each year for a decade, in line with a recommendation made this year by the government's own infrastructure experts, Infrastructure Victoria.
"We must act now," Mr Testro said.
"There are more than 66,000 people on the wait list for social housing in Victoria. If we don't start building much more social housing right now, we accept a reality in which tens of thousands more Victorians will be pushed into homelessness, and then get stuck there. We can't let that happen.
"I hope this exhibition helps more people understand that behind every instance of homelessness is a human being just like you and me, and inspires leaders to commit to the social housing building blitz Victoria needs. Lives depend on decisive government action."
Fast facts:
102,000 people sought assistance from homelessness services in Victoria in 2023/24 (up 4% from the previous year)
60,000 of them (58%) were women
13,000 were working Victorians (up 23% in 5 years)
One third of people seeking homelessness assistance in Australia are in Victoria, but we have the lowest proportion of social housing in the country (3%)
