How Princess Diana Provides “Inspiration and Guidance” for Prince William Today
In June 2023, Prince William officially launched Homewards, a charity with the goal of ending homelessness in the UK through five years of collaboration between the public and private sector. With more than a year of work under its belt, the organization is celebrating some early successes, including new benefits for homelessness frontline workers and more than a million dollars donated towards getting families into new homes. Later this fall, ITV will air a documentary about William’s work with the charity that will examine its day-to-day operations over the course of that year, and it includes some choice words from the prince about how his late mother, Princess Diana, inspired his commitment to the project in the first place.
“I’ve slowly tried to work out: what can I bring to the role and the platform that I have?” the prince says in a trailer for Prince William: We Can End Homelessness. “I have taken some inspiration and guidance from what my mother did, particularly with homelessness.”
Prince William speaks to young people during a volunteering visit to homelessness charity Centrepoint, in London, on September 13, 2005.
Getty Images.
The trailer also shows William volunteering at a food pantry serving hot meals, visiting a tent encampment, and talking to Fara Williams, a former England soccer player who spoke out in 2014 about her experiences with homelessness while she was playing professionally. “I don’t believe we should be living with homelessness in the 21st century,” William adds in the trailer.
William was involved with homelessness charities in the UK for more than 15 years before starting his own initiative to bring the nation’s stakeholders together. He first became a patron for Centrepoint, a charity that provides accommodation to young people, in 2005, taking over the role that Diana herself held from 1992 until her death in 1997. During the final years of her life, Diana donated to unhoused people and visited shelters across the nation, even bringing William and Prince Harry along. At a 2019 gala for the charity William said he took on the role of patron “because visiting Centrepoint’s services with my mother made such a lasting impression on me as a child. And it still makes a lasting impression on me today.”
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