Social network and health promotion of homeless population

Abstract

One of the outcomes of globalization has been a constant increase of the number of people living in the streets of metropolis such as São Paulo: those are not only homeless, but also people who live in the streets and earn their living from it. We have surveyed the institutions working with adult homeless population in the central region of Sao Paulo. Their goals and strategies were described, as well as how they associate with each other. Our main hypothesis is that our reality is still formed by isolated actions, based on mere assistance policies that help to maintain the problem of homelessness and turn it into a chronicle situation. Although, the participative methodology we chose has shown a small change from this model towards the idea of the emancipation of the subject. Even so, the idea of a technical knowledge still looms large and keeps the voice of the population in the background. The constitution of a network based on inter-sectorial actions (according to the perspective of health promotion) indicates the possibility of building innovatory public policies.