Accommodating a travelling life (ATL) project is framed within the need of offering innovative solutions to improve the services addressing homeless people. The aim of the project is to help organizations working in the field to conduct more effective interventions with persons living in the street by involving persons with first-hand experience in the intervention process. For that purpose, ATL introduces the figure of Journey Certified Supporters (JCS) – peer supporters with lived experience of homelessness, advanced in their recovery process and trained in the ATL methodology.

The ATL project team designed a tailor-made training model built on the principles of peer support methodology. The model entails a first phase in which professionals are trained, so that they can fully understand the peer support model and how to train and eventually support and conduct joint intervention with future peer supporters JCSs. The second phase, on the other hand, involves training people with experience of homelessness to become Journey Certified Supporters. Comprehensive information and a set of effective training tools have been developed to help the future JCS to give value to their life experience and use it to help homeless people to get out of the situation of extreme vulnerability and social exclusion.

The ATL methodology incorporates the Restorative Justice approach with the objective of contributing to the reestablishment of family and friendship ties and thus promoting the social rehabilitation. It addresses the recovery of homeless people from a respectful, unconditional approach, based on listening and dialogue, which does not judge or criticize.