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Our Story
CARIS Families is a London-based homelessness charity that supports families living in temporary accommodation hostels in the Boroughs of Camden and Hackney. Families often spend years living in overcrowded single rooms, facing instability that affects every aspect of daily life — from children’s development to parents’ mental health and ability to plan for the future.
Our Services
Our purpose is twofold: to help families cope and stay resilient during homelessness, and to support them to move into safe, settled homes as quickly as possible.
We do this through trusted, frontline services delivered directly within the hostels where families live. Our play and enrichment activities reduce the harm that homelessness causes to children’s wellbeing and development, while our poverty relief work helps families meet essential needs with dignity. Alongside this, we provide holistic family support and specialist housing casework to address the legal, financial and systemic barriers that keep families trapped in temporary accommodation.
Ongoing Support
Because our services are embedded in hostels, we are able to build close, long-term relationships with families who are often isolated and overlooked. This proximity allows us to respond quickly as needs arise, prevent issues from escalating and support families at critical moments — filling a significant gap in statutory provision.
Alongside our frontline work, we are a social justice charity. We campaign for reform of local and national temporary accommodation practice and work to expose the injustice faced by families at the sharp end of the housing crisis. We support families to share their experiences and contribute our frontline expertise to research, policy and campaigning, with a clear vision: a future where every child and parent can thrive in safe, secure housing.
Our History
CARIS Families was established in 2016 as a project of CARIS Camden, a charity founded to relieve poverty in Camden and surrounding areas. At the time, CARIS Camden’s work focused on street homelessness through the C4WS winter night shelter, leaving a gap in support for families experiencing poverty and homelessness.