Between January and June 2026, the COMHOM project is delivering a structured Capacity Building and Mentoring (CB&M) Programme designed to support a Europe-wide shift in how homelessness services collect, use, and act on data. Bringing together 20+ sub-grantees organisations from across the continent, the programme equips frontline providers, networks, and municipalities with the knowledge and tools needed to harness digital transformation in the fight against homelessness.
The CB&M programme is built around a dual-track approach of monthly training sessions and monthly mentoring sessions. From the perspective of an individual participant, this means approximately 20 hours of engagement per month – structured learning, followed by hands-on application. Participants are distributed across five mentoring groups, each meeting once a month to deepen their understanding and translate it into practice. The monthly training sessions covered a range of interconnected themes within the project’s Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Framework, including: theory of change, a feasible set of variables (developed by Sant Joan de Déu València), data privacy and GDPR compliance (supported by Chino.io), data integration through a standardisation and harmonisation toolkit (Sant Joan de Déu València), and data interfacing (Social IT).
Each training session is designed with clearly defined learning objectives and is followed by a dedicated mentoring session on the same topic. These mentoring sessions are conceived as participatory, facilitated workshops – spaces where participants could work through practical challenges, apply new concepts to their own organisational contexts, and advance the project’s shared outcomes together.
The programme is primarily delivered online, though in-person connection is a deliberate and valued part of its design. Three two-day face-to-face meetings are planned throughout the project. The first took place in December 2025 in Athens, Greece, bringing subgrantees together to build relationships and deepen collaboration. The second will take place in Helsinki, Finland, at the beginning of June 2026, and a final gathering is planned in Dublin, Ireland, in 2027.
The content and structure of the CB&M programme were jointly developed by the COMHOM consortium of ten organisations, who co-designed the training architecture and refined delivery methods based on ongoing participant feedback. This collaborative approach reflects the programme’s broader ambition: not only to transfer knowledge, but to nurture a genuine cultural change in how organisations across Europe understand and use data in their homelessness work.
Through its blend of structured learning, participatory mentoring, and cross-European exchange, the CB&M programme is laying the groundwork for more evidence-informed, coordinated, and digitally capable responses to homelessness across the continent.
The COMHOM project has received funding from the European Union’s European Social Fund (ESF+) under Grant Agreement No. 101172624