- I was diagnosed with bipolar, I had a psychosis and about a year later I entered the Doorway program. They helped me turn my life around. - Housing is so important to individuals. It's an essential human right. There are a lot of barriers for individuals who have mental health issues to access housing. The Doorway program was funded by the department of health, and specifically it's funded to support individuals who have mental illness who are experiencing homelessness. We support people to find housing within the private rental market, and we support them for an 18 month period within the community. Doorway is delivered by Wellways Australia in partnership with four hospitals. And we also work in partnership with a number of real estate agents in the community. - Having somewhere to live is the most important thing. When you don't have that, then everything else around you becomes unstable. - Most people coming into accessing homelessness services or experience mental illness might be accessing housing services such as public housing, community or social housing. Community housing projects such as Doorway are essential because it actually takes the pressure off those types of public housing wait lists. And it's essential for people to actually be able to access housing faster. - So I work with real estate agents a lot, everything from helping participants fill out tenancy applications to actually phone calls, face to face contact advocating on the behalf of participants, but more often than not getting wonderful feedback from real estate about how awesome the participants are in their houses. - It's not enough to just find a house for someone and close the door and say goodbye. Support is essential for individuals in the Doorway program. We need to be giving people the skills to be able to manage themselves. And there's also some advocacy that we need to do to the real estate agents around how to best support individuals who have mental health issues to sustain private rental. We don't want people to be in the mental health system forever. And actually our job is to do ourselves out of a job. - Some of the outcomes we see from the people using Doorway is that we do see them out in the community a lot more. When they first started, they would be quiet and a little bit withdrawn, but we are often now seeing them down the street, doing their own shopping, coming in seeing us, paying their own rent and doing all those kinds of things. It's great to see their confidence grown. I believe we're changing people's lives. - Since being in the Doorway program. I feel like I've become more hopeful about things and more optimistic.