My Streets Ireland empowers individuals who have experienced homelessness to become walking tour guides of ‘their’ town through the provision of necessary training and support.
Homeless people in Dublin are being trained as tour guides in the city they know so well
My Streets Ireland is one of some 1,400 social enterprises in the country that tackle social and environmental problems while also making a profit to reinvest in their missions. The vision of ‘My Streets’ is to empower and support individuals who have experienced homelessness with accessible training and education options while humanising the issue for the general in-home community.
The ‘My Streets’ scheme is giving a human reality to an all too often oversimplified issue
My Streets Ireland empowers individuals who have experienced homelessness to become walking tour guides of ‘their’ town through the provision of necessary training and support.
The unique tours provide a mixture of local history and personal insight from a guide who has experienced the streets of their town first hand, making for an informative and entertaining experience suitable for all interests and ages.
My Streets offers benefits to all involved ; the tour guides who receives professional training, support and earning potential, the local town which has its underappreciated gems revealed and the tourists who receive an informative, insightful tour.
Source: MyStreetsIreland.com
So far 28 guides have provided tours to over 9,500 paying members of the public
There are 9,698 people officially homeless in Ireland, 71,858 on social housing waiting lists and large numbers of family homes at risk of repossession.
These are just three facts that highlight the depth of the current housing and homelessness crisis in Ireland today; an industrial scale problem with grave social, moral and financial implications for the nation as a whole.
‘My Streets’ was born from a desire to re-imagine reductive narratives around homelessness and foster empathy amongst the general voting public.
The vision of ‘My Streets’ is to empower and support people who have experienced, or are experiencing, homelessness to take positive action in their own lives while humanising the issue to those of us lucky enough not to have experienced it first-hand.
This is achieved through the provision of professional, accessible training that allows for the cultivation of the necessary skills and confidence to provide quality tours.
A similar initiative has been successful in Amsterdam. Click for details.
Source: MyStreetsIreland.com
As a social enterprise ‘My Streets’ divides all proceeds between tour guides and costs associated with running the programme.
It is hoped that this earning potential allows the project to move beyond the traditionally restrictive narrative around ‘homelessness and helplessness’ and cast it in a new light as well as producing sufficient capital to roll the project out to a number of locations.
My Streets has been operational in Co. Louth since 2014 and in Dublin since November 2018. Source: Facebook – TheStreetsIreland
BOOK A TOUR!
DUBLIN CITY TOURS ARE OFFERED 7 DAYS A WEEK ON DEMAND—Tours are charged at a price of €10 per head. Click for details.