Scandinavian countries are often heralded as being at the forefront of tackling homelessness. We speak to Viveka Holmberg from Gatans Lag about the state of homelessness, how Housing First can help and the role sport can play.

Viveka Holmberg is the Stockholm Operations Manager at our Swedish partner Gatans Lag, which means ‘Law of the Street’. She’s been playing football for more than thirty years and believes in the power of sport to create a community and create positive and meaningful change.

Since starting up, Gatans Lag has gone from being a small charity in Gothenburg to expanding across the country. We find out the key lessons Viveka has learnt since joining and how sport can help people to reintegrate into society.

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Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick from Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh has been looking at global homelessness for more than 20 years.

From assessing the A Place Called Home programme tackling street homelessness, to measuring the state of homelessness in the UK, we speak to her about the role that academics can play in ending global homelessness, the lessons she’s learnt and some of the surprises she’s come across in more than two decades worth of research.

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Official government figures of people affected by homelessness in Japan have fallen to some of the lowest levels since measurements started, but experts say this doesn’t show the full picture. We speak to Big Issue Japan co-founder Miku Sano.

Miku Sano has been working on tackling homelessness since founding Big Issue Japan in 2003, but how has the situation changed since then and what is being done to support the rising number of young people who are priced out of Japan’s largest cities?

We talk about the state of homelessness in Japan’s second city, Osaka, which has the largest number of people who are homeless. We also discuss the millions of empty houses which are scattered across the country and whether these can be part of a solution.

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Bongani Mathiso captained the South African side at the Homeless World Cup in Mexico in 2012. Now he’s working with not-for-profit organisation Oasis who helped him to turn his life around after “living the life of a lie” taking drugs and committing crime.

We spoke to him about how lessons learnt on the pitch can translate to everyday life and how important it is for politicians to understand what's happening on the ground if they’re going to tackle homelessness.

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