The Homeless World Cup: Mel Young on Practical Change

Mel Young is a true Edinburgh, nay Scottish, hero. In over twenty years of working on the issue of homelessness, he has been nothing if not highly effective, and imaginative. As the Homeless World Cup gears up for its biggest year to date, RJ Thomson speaks to the organisation's founder about what really makes a difference

Feature by RJ Thomson | 01 Sep 2008

Eighty per cent of participants in the Homeless World Cup have made dramatic changes to their lives soon after taking part. That's some record; and it's one that Mel Young, who has worked on homelessness issues for more than twenty years since founding the Big Issue in Scotland in 1993, is in no way blasé about.

"Reintegration is really hard," he tells me. "Sometimes it's two steps forward one back, or three back. And yet these figures were suggesting something had happened immediately. So we investigated that very thoroughly, and it turned out to be true." When I meet Young in the Leith-based attic office of the Homeless World Cup, he is unashamedly proud of his achievements. Yet he is also so evidently delighted to have been able to have had a real effect, and so realistic about the scale of the remaining worldwide problem of homelessness, that it's impossible not to be genuinely inspired.

In fact, I'm particularly pleased to be able to present this interview as part of our Local Heroes special issue, because Young is somewhat rueful about the degree of enthusiasm for the Homeless World Cup - which is quickly becoming a global phenomenon - that exists here in Scotland. It's nice to be able to provide a bit more recognition and appreciation.

I'm also pleased to include him as part of the Hyperculture series of interviews, because so much of what he had to say in conversation echoed, or contrasted interestingly, with comments made by previous interviewees. If you have a look online at our interview with Charles Leadbeater, who is presenting his current 'big idea' of We-Think at the Engage Scotland conference this month, you'll start to see what I mean. Type 'Hyperculture' into the search box and there are more cross-references to be made.

But to go back to that statistic - eighty per cent of participants making major changes to their lives - it's probably appropriate to put it in a bit of context. There are now a lot of people involved with the Homeless World Cup, despite the fact that it's all coordinated by a team of six folk in an attic by the Shore. In Nairobi, Kenya earlier this year, 264 teams, featuring 3,000 players, came to compete to see which team would represent Kenya at the next Homeless World Cup. The tournament was watched by 500,000 people over the space of a fortnight. Though this is the biggest qualification process the organisers have yet heard of, with partnerships existing in over 70 countries around the world, it's clear that the headline event itself is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of giving huge numbers of people a renewed sense of purpose. How on earth did it get so big? It seemed appropriate to take it from the top...

Whose idea was the Homeless World Cup, and how did you come to be working on it?

Well it was my idea actually, with a colleague called Harald Schmied. We both were running street papers: I was running the Big Issue in Scotland and he was running one in Graz. All the street papers had come together to create a trade association called the International Network of Street Papers, which is a global organisation but with a tiny budget.(1) All that people were able to do in the beginning time [...] was to meet once a year and have an annual conference - which was always very positive and important. We'd talk with each other 'til three in the morning about how things were working in our own countries and how we could work together. And at the conference in 2001, I was sitting in the bar with Harald at the end of the conference, and we were saying how great this conference had been, but there were no homeless people: there were editors or directors or founders, and we were all getting this great adrenaline and inspiration from this international conference. How could homeless people experience the same thing?

We thought of having a conference for homeless people, but we thought they would be bored. We talked about exchanging our homeless sellers, but we thought that would be difficult because of Visa problems. Then we thought of another problem - language. And we thought: there's only one international language, it's called football. So I said, 'well, some of our homeless vendors in Scotland claim to have some semblance of a football team; they could be Scotland'. And Harald said he had the same situation in Austria, and that they could be Austria. So we said 'okay, we'll play each other: Scotland v Austria'. I said that we'd win because we never win anything at football, and he said they'd win 'cause they never win anything at football. We shook on a deal.

Then we had some more beer, and by the end of the night we said 'every team should come', and we called it the Homeless World Cup.

And then in the morning - I suspect you've had this too, when you have these wonderful conversations at night and then the next morning you think 'well that was a wonderful conversation' - but then we talked about it the next day and asked: 'well will we do it?' And we said we'd do it. So 18 months later we had the first one.

Do you feel Edinburgh is a natural home for the Homeless World Cup?

Well, yes and no. Yes because it was born here, and I live here. And yes because we hosted it in 2005. It was supposed to be in New York, but we had a problem with visas. We had an emergency, and had to make a decision about whether we were going to skip a year or have the event somewhere else. We made a decision that to skip a year was the wrong thing to do because we had this whole momentum: we had to try to put it on somewhere. It was a big risk, because all our sponsorship went to zero. But we put it on here in Edinburgh, and it was a big success. It was an example of a community coming together, because it was like: 'Right, we've got no money - jackets off, sleeves up', and on the phone to, like, everybody I knew. And that made it happen and put it back on course. So that's another reason why it's here.

But equally, logistically Edinburgh isn't the right place: we really ought to be in Geneva, Switzerland where the other sporting associations are.

And I also think, without wanting to sound hypocritical, that I don't think Edinburgh, or Scotland in general, really embraces some things that are good. Without wishing to blow our own trumpet, this is an incredible thing that has happened, the attention it's getting across the world, from the world's governments, and the effect it's having on homeless people is incredible. And it's all centred here in Edinburgh; and Edinburgh, and Scotland in general, doesn't really seem to get it.

Other countries have come to us and said 'why don't you locate it in our country; we'll give you lots of incentives; we really want you here'. Whereas in Scotland you sometimes feel as though [people are thinking] 'what are you doing here?'. This disappoints me a bit, but in some ways the spiritual home for this is here so it'll always be here.

At the 2005 Homeless World Cup I bought the T-shirt, and it was made by Nike, having previously thought I'd never buy anything from Nike.(2) How much support do you get from companies like that?

There are two sides to the Homeless World Cup: there's the organisation, which runs as a social enterprise and puts on the events; and there's the foundation, which handles the more grassroots side. And we run the organisation like the Olympics or like the FIFA World Cup - although smaller! - and so we have to get sponsors in the same way they get sponsors. Nike have been with us since the beginning; they are a fabulous company to work with; they've been very supportive of us. They give us finance [and] they give us marketing advice. Journalists in the past have said: 'Aren't you working with the enemy? These are the kinds of people you shouldn't be working with.'

But my point of view is that we'll work with anybody who wants to work with us in a genuine partnership. The results are that it's bringing about change, and so without Nike we wouldn't have this level of change.

And secondly, anyway, their company has really changed since the time they had issues with supply-chain. If you look at their level of social responsibility and transparency, then they're now - in terms of sports apparel - the top company, and they'll allow anybody to come and have a look at what they're doing. And they're now becoming very progressive with some of the decisions they're making. So for us, working with a company that's young, innovative, go-ahead, makes quick decisions - it's perfect for us. We have a good relationship with them.

So do you think working with big business is a strong way forward for social enterprises and foundations?

I think the world is changing: big business is starting to realise - if nothing else from its own self-interest - that it's much better to do business in a good world than a bad world. They realise that the world is finite, that you can't go on mining the world forever. It's something that this credit crunch is bringing forward as an issue: that people only have a finite amount of money, you can't go on spending spending spending; you can't go on and on and on throwing your rubbish out; you can't go on and on mining for oil because it's going to run out. It's dangerous to have a world that's full of, on one half rich people, and on the other half poor people, with a gap between; it's not sustainable, and it falls apart.

I think it's also because there's a changing issue of 'who takes responsibility?'. Traditionally, if you look back in history, it has been the church who looked after poor people or people in ill-health. But then post-war in Britain you had the growth of the welfare state, and so it all became government. And over the past couple of decades you've seen the growth of the charity sector, as well as government. But it seems that in the modern age governments are incapable of delivering proper social welfare: partly because the structure is very slow; partly because it can't afford it, because no-one pledging high tax will get voted in. You have to look no further than the US to see what happens when this occurs.(3)

So it seems that another change is going on, where maybe for the next generation welfare is no longer the fiefdom of the government; the government is doing something else and welfare is the fiefdom of business. Maybe that happens. But certainly, there's a sea change going on. Interesting times.

One thing that comes to mind is the Hometime 2012 campaign; we were contacted by the Leith Agency(4) and we're working with them to promote it. It seems appropriate to me that you have an advertising agency and a magazine, rather than giving money - which certainly for us is a very scant resource - doing what they do to support the campaign: which actually makes it more effective.

That's a very good point you make, and that's exactly the sort of thing that's going on. If you'd have looked at The Skinny and the Leith Agency 20 years ago, would that conversation have taken place? I doubt it very much. But now you're thinking, 'what can we do?', and although it's not costing you anything you're using your creative energy to do something constructive. I think that's a good example of the type of thing that's happening all over the place.

There are two statistics used for homelessness the world over: one is one billion, the other is one hundred million. So whatever way you want to look at it, it's ginormous. You look at it and you just blank out, because how can you as an individual deal with a billion homeless people? How do you come up with an answer? What you do is you just don't think about it: you just do what you can do. Which is just a little, but if it's affecting one person or half a dozen people then it's better than nothing.

It's fascinating and very encouraging, what you've said about people taking part and then ceasing to be homeless. It's almost a paradox: whenever you hear about the wish to eradicate something, it almost arrives with an undercurrent of sustaining that thing; the traditional model of that would be of 'charity', where you try to eradicate poverty by giving away your ill-gotten gains; and on the flipside you've got things like the Homeless World Cup, where the very name implies you need homelessness to run, but actually you get rid of it.

True. Our success here kind of mirrors the failure of the world. There's homelessness now in every country in the world. And it is absurd that we have to have something like the Homeless World Cup.

[With at least] one hundred million people on the streets in the world, we've come up with a practical way we can change people's lives. And I maintain if we're changing one or two, it doesn't matter - as long as we're changing some. The key for us is that change. The events are great fun, but I think if we were just doing that, even if we were raising the profile of the issue and changing people's consciousness, then I wouldn't continue doing it. The key thing is the number of people who are actually getting involved and changing. So as long as that happens we'll keep doing it. But for sure: our aim is not to exist!

(1) The International Network of Street Papers website is here.

(2) This wasn't a totally random decision, there was an outcry in the late 1990s about the treatment of workers in Nike factories in Thailand, China and Vietnam. More info can be found here.

(3) At another point in the interview Young observes that the quoted figure for homeless in the US is 3m, and that this is "a disgrace".

(4) The Leith Agency is a Leith-based advertising agency behind, among others, the recent award-winning Irn Bru campaigns. The Hometime 2012 campaign is concerned with putting back on the agenda the Scottish government's commitment to providing everyone with a suitable home by 2012. More info can be found here.

http://www.homelessworldcup.org/content/melbourne-2008