Prince William: I truly believe that homelessness can be ended

Can we just stop for a moment and acknowledge the hilarity of Prince William doing some big homelessness project launch in July? He’s about to disappear for three full months of “summer vacation,” but before he disappears, he’s going to tell everyone about his “landmark” project to “end homelessness.” In case you missed the launch of Huevo’s Homewards project last year, he’s spent £3 million of Royal Foundation money and those funds are being parceled out to six homeless shelters/halfway houses. While the donations are fine, my concern was that William was basically adding extra layers of bureaucracy to the system rather than allowing homeless charities to simply administer the funds as needed. Homewards was criticized across the board though, for a variety of reasons, not least of which was William’s arrogant need to center himself as the sole savior of homeless people.

Well, continuing on that theme, William has now done a documentary in which people can see him centering himself in the issue of homelessness. The two-part documentary is called Prince William: We Can End Homelessness. It’s not supposed to come out until the fall, but William is well aware that his brother is about to pick up a major award tonight, so the crack team at Kensington Palace threw together a big speech for William to make today. KP sent out advanced copies of the speech to the British media, and here we go:

The Prince of Wales will say on Thursday that he “truly” believes homelessness can be “ended”, despite it blighting the lives of “far too many people”. Prince William is marking the first year of his project to solve homelessness, which will report its progress in building community links to make homelessness “rare, brief and unrepeated”.

He has recently hosted members of the public who have had “lived experience” of homelessness, inviting them to Windsor to hear more about what needs to be done to help.

At a speech due to be delivered at an event in Lambeth, south London, on Thursday morning, he will say: “Homelessness is a complex societal issue and one that touches the lives of far too many people in our society. However, I truly believe that it can be ended.”

He hopes to “demonstrate that it is possible to end homelessness,” he will add.

The Prince’s Homewards project is working in six UK locations, building a network between the public, private and third sectors to identify the root causes of different forms of homelessness and make progress towards eradicating it in five years. Matt Downie, CEO of homeless charity Crisis and a Homewards sector partner, said of the ethos: “The question isn’t what are our big problems and how can we wallow in them. The question is who can help?”

He added: “We are facing some really, really tough times. Homelessness is going up but actually, the evidence to end homelessness has never been better.”

[From The Telegraph]

They released a video, below, which is basically full of testimonials about how Homewards is the most groundbreaking thing ever. They’re also calling this the one-year anniversary of the five-year project… but they’re late. The one-year anniversary was in June. It’s weird that they held this “one year anniversary” keeery for the middle of July, because (as I said) William is about to disappear for three months. One thing I’ll give the film crew is that at least they didn’t lead it off by centering William. At least we’re hearing from the people on the ground, you know?

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pLHLnpmirJOdxm%2BvzqZmcW9pbn5ye8%2BroKeblZTEqrjLopiml5mUwbPBy7KWm52cnrK3sb6tn5qsj528rrHLnqqsppWowKCvwKeWm52PmrulscNo