Hidden Homelessness

46% of homeless women surveyed reported walking all night in a 3-month period*. Homelessness is often seen as solely sleeping on the streets, but at Basis Yorkshire, we know many homeless women in Leeds are hidden in plain sight. For World Homelessness Day 2025 and for our Big Give fundraising campaign, we published our Hidden Homelessness film. The film is co-produced with women who have experienced homelessness and unstable housing and echoes the findings of the Leeds Women’s Rough Sleeping Census 2024.

One of the main hurdles in producing meaningful, personal content is that we work with vulnerable people and cannot feature them in the forefront. This limitation became a core theme of our video, reflecting the hidden and anonymous nature of women’s homelessness. This also led to active co-production, with service users contributing to the script, storyboard and producing the masks featured in the film.

The film has led to more exposure through increased social media activity and being shown at the Leeds City Council’s Homelessness Conference 2025, as well as seeing over double the amount of donations to our Big Give campaign on previous years.

This film highlights the lived experience and reality of women experiencing homelessness in Leeds, no longer hidden away, and part of the wider community. *From the Leeds Women’s Rough Sleep Census 2024