Among the homeless in Belfast, to photograph (and fight against) social inequalities

In Belfast, to photograph the conditions in which many homeless people live today. And with the aim of raising awareness and bringing the experience of lives to the margins of society in complex contexts, where the already present daily difficulties are added to those dictated by the need for survival.
The project BG4SDGs – Time to Change, developed by Stefano Guindani with General Bank in order to deepen the state of the art of the process of achieving the 17 objectives of theUN Agenda 2030has as its focus social exclusion and the fight to reduce inequalities.

Presented on 15 September 2021 in Milan, BG4SDGs – Time to Chang aims to deepen all 17 SDGs of the UN 2030 Agenda. For each of them, the key adopted will be twofold: on the one hand, the aim is to highlight the negative action of man on the environment and on the community, on the other hand, how mankind itself has instead an extraordinary capacity for recovery through innovative solutions and sustainable.

The lens of the photographer Stefano Guindani, in this case, stopped to investigate the situation relating to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 10so long as inequality is one of the major obstacles to sustainable development and the fight against poverty and therefore to the achievement of various objectives present in the Agenda of the United Nations.

Poverty, the “case” of Northern Ireland

According to OECD data I am over 2 million people in advanced countries without a home and a roof to shelter under, who live and face one of the most extreme forms of social exclusion every day. A number growing by about 10% every year, with the USA in first place and with thenorthern Ireland among the advanced European countries that have a high incidence of homeless people, a phenomenon induced by the not distant housing crisis of 2019.

After many years in which the rate of households with home ownership was among the highest in the world, the situation in Ireland has reversed after the financial crisis and then the Brexitwith rent costs almost quadrupling in the last 5 years which have caused a considerable increase in evictions and a complex situation to manage, characterized by high levels of inequality within the country.

Photographing the rediscovered dignity

To counter this situation, the institute Helm Housing launched the pilot project in 2013 Housing First Belfast, dedicated to all those people who have been living without a home for many years and who need more support. The goal of this project is to counter the phenomenon by placing homeless people in individual independent apartments, in order to promote a state of dignified well-being and with forms of social reintegration. The photographer Stefano Guindani he went to Belfast precisely in order to tell and document this new condition, through his shots.

“Ethical choices can sometimes have a positive impact not only on conscience, but also on the economy,” he explains Guindani. “The project Housing First is an example of this: it aims to find a home for homeless people in difficulty, favoring their reintegration into society and at the same time to weigh less on the costs of public administration. A person who manages to reintegrate into society will have a lower impact on the judicial system, by committing fewer crimes, and on the health system, by maintaining psycho-physical health. A complex and virtuous project but also a different and pragmatic way of seeing the world, where the good of individuals and the common good become one.”

However, housing integration is not the only problem that the poorest people have to face, but only the starting point. The other great challenge is the instrumental and emotional support to the person carried out by multi-professional teams with meetings dedicated to listening to the different needs such as housing management, health care or job search.