Simon Brooke Award 2022 – Call for Submissions

Simon Brooke was a longstanding advocate of social and affordable housing in Ireland. His passion for the sector and for the provision of high-quality, affordable, secure homes for individuals and families across the country was borne out in his work over many decades. Simon worked in the housing and homelessness sector in the UK from the 1970s and in Ireland from the 1990s. This included a major campaign in the 1980s to close down and rehouse the residents of unhygienic, overcrowded hostels in London and in 2008, an important evaluation of homeless services in Ireland with the Homeless Agency.

In 1998, Simon joined Clúid Housing, Ireland’s largest Approved Housing Body (AHB), as a board member before becoming Head of Policy in 2012. Simon played a proactive role in developing the AHB sector in Ireland, setting out a clear reform agenda in his 2001 Blue Paper ‘Social Housing for the Future: Can housing associations meet the challenge?’ for the Policy Institute at Trinity College, Dublin.

In his work with Clúid, he became known as a passionate champion of social housing and those living in social housing, and managed a range of important research projects, relating to stigma in social housing, housing for older people, fuel poverty and, most recently, the management of multi-unit housing developments. Importantly, this work had a tangible influence on the development of Irish housing policy, and will have lasting impacts.

Up until his untimely death in November 2019, Simon worked tirelessly to break the stigmas attached to social housing and to ensure that everyone in Ireland had a great place to live.

Simon was also a passionate supporter of exchange of best practice and policy in housing. It is on this basis that we are calling for essay submissions from housing practitioners (working in either an Approved Housing Body (AHB) or a Local Authority in any location in Ireland) on the topic of the intersection between domestic violence and social housing in Ireland. Essays should include consideration of how access to social housing can be improved for survivors of domestic violence and how can we improve the response of Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs) and Local Authorities to domestic violence within social housing. This is particularly relevant in the context of the forthcoming new national strategy on sexual and domestic violence.

The author of the winning essay will be awarded the Simon Brooke Award and a gift voucher.

The award will be officially presented on the day of the inaugural Simon Brooke Public Lecture, taking place this summer in Woodquay, Dublin City Council, Dublin.

Submission process
Applicants should submit an essay of no more than 2,000 words on the topic set out above. The deadline for applications for the Simon Brooke Award is April 4th, 2022. All submissions should be e-mailed to fdunkin@cluid.ie with ‘Simon Brooke Award submission’ in the subject line.