#ASKWHY
Reflection from ESSC 2026
As Europe continues to navigate rising inequality, social fragmentation and increasing pressure on public services, there is a growing recognition that social care and support systems cannot work in isolation. Across countries, there are shared challenges around poverty, exclusion, ageing populations, mental health and access to dignified support — but there is also an opportunity to learn differently from one another.
The 2026 European Social Services Conference (ESSC) feels particularly timely within this context. Its focus on building bridges across systems, professions and communities invites an important reflection on what truly helps people feel connected, understood and supported within social services.
What resonates most strongly is not simply the idea of integrating services, but the deeper question underneath it: how do we create systems that people can genuinely access, trust and belong within?
Too often, services remain fragmented, shaped by thresholds, specialisms and institutional boundaries that make sense organisationally, but feel overwhelming or inaccessible to the people trying to navigate them. People with lived experience of homelessness, trauma or exclusion frequently describe being passed between services without anyone fully understanding the complexity of their lives or relationships.
This is why conversations about “bridging boundaries” matter. Not just between countries or organisations, but between professional expertise and lived experience, between policy and practice, and between systems and the people they are intended to support.
For me, one of the most important aspects of this work is recognising that inclusion is not achieved solely through service design or strategy documents. It happens through relationships, trust, dignity and the willingness to see people beyond labels or presenting behaviours.
The reflections in this blog come from that perspective — one rooted in social work, relational practice and learning from people whose experiences of homelessness and exclusion challenge us to think differently about support, safety and belonging.
From “Why Won’t They Accept Help?” to “What Happened to You?”
Reflections on research in practice-multiple exclusion, disadvantage, Social Work and the Importance of Understanding-#ASKWHY
There are moments in homelessness work that stay with you.
Not because they are dramatic or headline-grabbing, but because they quietly challenge the assumptions we carry — about people, about systems and about what support really means.
For many of us working alongside people experiencing long-term rough sleeping, one question comes up repeatedly:
Why do some people struggle to accept or sustain help, even when support is available?
It is a question often framed publicly through ideas of personal choice or individual responsibility. But the more time you spend listening to people with lived experience of homelessness, the more those assumptions begin to unravel.
Because homelessness is rarely just about housing.
And people’s relationships with services are often shaped by trauma, exclusion, fear, stigma and systems that have repeatedly failed to understand them.
What the Pandemic Revealed
The COVID-19 pandemic created an extraordinary moment through the Everyone In initiative. For perhaps the first time in recent history, barriers that often slow progress in homelessness responses appeared to shift almost overnight.
Accommodation was found quickly. Funding became available. Agencies worked together with urgency and focus.
And yet, even in that moment, some people struggled to come inside or remain in accommodation.
For many frontline workers, this prompted important reflection. If support was available, what was preventing some people from being able to engage with it in ways systems expected?
Too often, homelessness systems are built around assumptions that everyone can process information, regulate emotions, trust professionals and make decisions in predictable ways. But for many people experiencing multiple exclusion homelessness, life has not created the conditions for that.
Listening Differently
One of the most important lessons from trauma-informed practice is that behaviour communicates something.
What services sometimes label as ‘non-engagement’, ‘chaotic behaviour’ or ‘refusing support’ can often reflect histories of trauma, cognitive impairment, fear or previous experiences of rejection.
People with lived experience of homelessness frequently describe services where they felt processed rather than understood — where the focus was on compliance instead of relationships.
That reflection matters.
Because if systems repeatedly ask people to adapt to environments that feel unsafe, overwhelming or inaccessible, it should not surprise us when engagement becomes difficult.
Social work offers a different lens here. Not one rooted in rescue or paternalism, but in curiosity, relational practice and recognition of structural inequality.
It asks us to pause before judgement and consider the broader context of someone’s life.
Richard’s Story and the Importance of Understanding
Richard’s experience illustrates how easily people can become misunderstood.
Before becoming homeless, Richard had a career, relationships and stability. Following a traumatic brain injury after a road traffic collision, his ability to regulate emotions, retain information and navigate everyday life changed significantly.
Eventually, his relationships broke down and he became homeless.
During the pandemic, accommodation was offered to him repeatedly, but placements continually failed.
It would have been easy to view this solely through the language of ‘choice’ or ‘refusal’. But doing so would have ignored the realities of living with cognitive impairment and trauma.
When practitioners took time to understand Richard’s experiences and adapt support around his needs, a different picture emerged.
The issue was not a lack of desire for stability or safety. The issue was that systems expected forms of memory, organisation and emotional regulation that he struggled to sustain without consistent support.
What changed Richard’s situation was not simply accommodation.
It was being understood.
That distinction feels important.
Why Reflection Matters in Homelessness Practice
Homelessness work can become heavily focused on crisis, targets and immediate risk. Those pressures are real.
But reflection matters because without it, systems can unintentionally reduce people to presentations or behaviours rather than recognising their histories, identities and strengths.
People experiencing rough sleeping are often spoken about in ways that imply they are problems to be managed rather than people navigating immense complexity.
Lived experience voices continue to remind services that dignity, trust and relationships are not optional extras — they are central to meaningful support.
That requires humility from professionals and organisations. It requires acknowledging that services do not always get it right and that expertise does not sit only within professional systems.
Some of the most important insights into homelessness come from people who have lived through it themselves.
Towards a Different Way of Seeing
Perhaps one of the most important shifts we can make is moving away from asking:
‘What is wrong with this person?’
and towards asking:
‘What has this person experienced, and what would support look like if it truly reflected that reality?’
That question changes the conversation.
It encourages services to become more relational, more trauma-informed and more willing to work alongside people rather than expecting people to fit neatly within systems.
It also challenges wider societal narratives about rough sleeping and responsibility.
Because when people are repeatedly excluded, misunderstood or labelled, the issue is not simply individual behaviour. It is also about whether systems are designed to recognise complexity, humanity and difference.
Final Reflections
Ending multiple exclusion and disadvantage, is not only about increasing housing supply or improving services, although both matter enormously.
It is also about how society chooses to see people.
Whether we respond with judgement or understanding.
Whether we create systems that demand compliance before compassion, or systems capable of meeting people where they are.
And whether we genuinely place lived experience at the centre of shaping the responses intended to support people.
Social work has an important role within this conversation — not because it has all the answers, but because at its best, it creates space for reflection, relationships, advocacy and human connection.
Sometimes the most powerful intervention is not doing more to people.
It is understanding them more fully.
