Our Story

Your Own Place prevents homelessness.

At a time of a cost of living and enduring housing crisis, we ensure people have the knowledge, skills, resilience and connections to avoid rent arrears, access and keep their home.  As targeted prevention and early intervention work, ours is the belief that no-one has to end up homeless and no-one should.  Despite this crisis, many can be supported to avoid falling over the edge. Everyone deserves a safe and secure home. 

Your Own Place was started by Rebecca White in 2013. From a secondary teaching background and having worked in homelessness, prisons and commissioning, Rebecca is passionate about equality, people, their potential and those facing most systemic barriers. Observing during her career a gap in empathic, values-based and really good quality workshops for people getting in their home and moving to independence, Your Own Place was born.

Over eight years later and Your Own Place has worked with over 850 people, trained over 300 volunteers and is not short of partners, ideas and passion.

It remains our aim to be the stand-out enterprise preventing homelessness with evidence-based and high quality facilitation that people from all backgrounds and stages in life want to be a part of.

Our Vision & Values

Our vision

Every person lives in a safe and secure home.

Our Mission

To prevent homelessness. Empowering people through group workshops to feel in control of their money and keep their home. Tenants with increased knowledge, skills, confidence and resilience in managing their money are more likely to keep their home. We facilitate these workshops in a way that is collaborative, equal, empathic, democratic, fun, experiential and effective. We draw out the knowledge, skills and resilience that people already have to share across their community and peer group.

Our values

Preferring never to use labels, avoiding prejudice, being non-judgemental we avoid assumptions about those with whom we work and know they are the experts in their own lives.

Our values, lived and breathed, are:

• EQUALITY
• ASSET-BASED
• RESTORATIVE
• INNOVATIVE, ENGAGING AND FUN
• HIGH QUALITY
• EMPATHIC

Our Services

• Tenancy & Independent Living Skills Plus (TILS+) workshops to address the cost of living crisis
• Plus Employability Support
• Your Own Place Advisory Board (YOPAB)
• Cost of Living Support