A lot of the time I find “Housing First” and “Rapid Re-Housing” to be misused terms. Below I briefly outline the definitions and service components to each. When asked to assist organizations or communities realign their service delivery to be more effective or to evaluate their housing programs, this is the understanding of Housing First and Rapid Re-Housing that I try to generate awareness of in the community. As this is a blog and not a two or three day training seminar, I am focusing on hitting the high points. (Maybe some day I will find a publisher that will take me on to write the more exhaustive description, program examples, etc – but I digress.) As a philosophy housing first (intentionally a lower case “h” and lower case “f”) focuses on any attempt to help people who have experienced homelessness to access housing before providing assistance and support with any other life issues. In this orientation, the intervention of Housing First and Rapid Re-Housing both fit. Given housing is the only known cure to homelessness, the success comes with helping ideal candidates achieve the cure sooner rather than later. As an intervention Housing First is a specific type of service delivery. Delivered through Intensive Case Management or Assertive Community Treatment, fidelity to the core aspects of the service can be measured. Housing First is specifically not a “first come, first served” intervention. It intentionally seeks out chronically homeless individuals that have complex, and most often co-occurring issues, and serves [...]
If you work in the homeless service sector you should have a very simple career goal – to put yourself out of a job. I have this belief that homeless and housing support services exist to end homelessness. They don’t exist to make people in human services feel good about themselves. They don’t exist to cleanse the consciousness of corporations through their philanthropy. They don’t exist to keep government bureaucracies humming along. There is a difference between wanting to end homelessness and committing to end homelessness. If you want to do something, you may or may not achieve it, and likely only under certain favorable conditions. If you commit to do something you will have steadfast fixity of purpose. When the conditions are unfavorable you will be the catalyst to actively change those conditions, remaining solution-focused all the while instead of accepting barriers as immovable, intractable problems that get in the way of ending homelessness. Am I so naïve to think we will never need homeless shelters again? Heck no. But we will have a lot less of them and they will return to their original use – short term, infrequent stays to meet emergency needs. They will no longer be de facto housing. They will no longer be places that we load in program incentives that actually make it difficult to leave. I like to think of homeless shelters in the same way that I think of fire stations – I hope I never need the fire department, but [...]
When I lived in a Fine Arts Residence 20 or so years ago, I saw, heard and read all sorts of weird and wonderful things that I don’t think I would have ever experienced in any other setting. One of those experiences was a weekly group reading of Raymond Carver’s 1976 collection of short stories called Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? If you aren’t familiar with Carver, he is a rather gloomy, minimalist writer in the “New Realism” school. Time and location aren’t always clear in his short stories. So different than other literature I had been exposed to in high school, I really enjoyed Carver. One of the short stories contained within Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is called Collectors. In a nutshell there is an unemployed guy waiting at home for mail to come (as I recall), and instead a door-to-door vacuum salesman arrives. My impression from the story is that the vacuum salesman knew that a sale was unlikely/impossible, yet he enters into the home and does the full vacuum demonstration anyway. It comes across as absurd – yet depressingly realistic – as the vacuum salesperson goes through the complete sales pitch, in what seems to take hours, to someone who will never buy the product. (There is even some confusion in the story as to whether the vacuum salesman is speaking with the right person.) A couple of paragraphs in, I suspect some of you are wondering what the heck this has to do [...]
I love the work we get to do with specific organizations and communities to help them make the change in becoming even better at their work. In the back of my mind, as I do this work, there are several questions that I try to have answered, and I encourage you to reflect on your own organization and community as you go through these questions: 1. Has the organization/community grown complacent? I haven’t found a good measure for complacency, but there are a couple of sure-fire indicators that I pay attention to – and they happen in tandem. The first is complete satisfaction with how things are; the second is active rejection of how things might be. The adage “grow or die” is true. That doesn’t mean to get bigger. It just means that organizations and communities have to be thirsty for information and training that enhances professional development; that they have to grow in their ability to provide efficiency or effectiveness in service delivery; and, they have to grow in such a way that ensures that what they are doing happens within a broader framework of service excellence. I encourage people to, as appropriate, break the mold. Some people say things like “thinking outside the box”, but in some instances I think the better question is “What box?” I have never met an excellent organization/community that was happy with “good enough”. 2. What is the organization/community currently doing well? Too often when people look at change they focus all [...]
This week I was in Detroit for a couple of days wrapping up an assignment we had been working on with the Homeless Action Network of Detroit on Performance Management. On Tuesday, I was making a presentation to the community on the most salient points and recommendations of our final report. What struck me during the delivery of the information was how important it is for greatness to be seen as a shared responsibility. Want to end homelessness in your community? Not going to happen by one person or one organization. Not going to happen because the Continuum of Care wills it to be so. Not going to happen because external experts were brought in. It is only going to happen if there is a shared responsibility to work on greatness across all organizations, working in collaboration with the CoC, and where necessary, external experts. The word “collaboration” is an interesting one. Let’s break it down (with apologies to those who have heard me make the same remarks during a keynote or presentation in the last six months or so…). “Collaboration” comes from the Latin “collaboratus” which means to “labor together” and came to rise in the 1860s after the Industrial Revolution and the organization of labor that resulted from the paradigm shift in the economy. [Aside #1 – while tempted to go on a diversion about social justice and the Chartist movement, I am showing considerable restraint. Aside #2 – “Collaboration” also came to have negative connotations in the [...]
For individuals that have had a long history of homelessness there is a psychological adaptation that occurs. The experience of being homeless and spending most days trying to meet basic needs becomes normal as a survival mechanism. The individual’s social network – if there is one – tends to be comprised mainly of others that have experienced homelessness for long periods of time. All of this is are common – if not expected – adaptations to combat the stressors of long-term homelessness. It helps ensure survival. In many communities, the long-term homeless population is not one that is underserved. Because of the survival mentality, these individuals have learned how to use the system of services to survive. As a result, they can, in some many instances, be over-served. But none of the services may be adequately focused on ending their homelessness. The services are focused primarily on keeping people alive for another day. Keeping people alive through these services such as shelter, drop-ins, meal programs and the like certainly have benefits (I am definitely not advocating that we do nothing and let people die) but the proliferation of the services and long-term use of them can create a dependency. The very things that are keeping people alive may have the unintended consequence of propelling the psychological transformation further to the point where recipients of the services become desensitized to the true function of the services (to meet short-term immediate needs). Below I outline the four steps in the Journey to [...]
Recently I was in a community where a rather large service provider proclaimed that less than 10 of the households they served in the past year experienced recidivism. I was in awe. I wanted to know more. This could be the secret sauce! The holy grail of homelessness! The Colonel’s secret recipe! But alas, it was all for nothing. Like so many times before when I have heard about apparently amazing and effective programs, the truth of the matter is that the service provider totally misunderstood what recidivism is in a homeless system. I don’t blame them. I want to educate them. Recidivism comes from the Latin word recidivus, which means to fall or to fall back. Some dictionaries will focus attention on falling back into crime. If it isn’t obvious to people familiar with me, and my blogs, I don’t equate homelessness with criminal activity. So, to fall back. Let’s work with that. What the service provider really meant was that they had less than 10 households that had fallen back to them. To them. In communities with limited data systems, this may be the only way to track recidivism by organization, but it is a very limited way of tracking recidivism and one that isn’t true in a system context, especially in medium and large cities. A service provider may know how many households fell back to them, but it doesn’t accurately tell us how many households fell back into homelessness. Further investigation in this particular example revealed [...]
This week I am unveiling our new Recovery-oriented Housing Support Training. One of the areas I felt it necessary to add more time and attention is related to the importance of expressing and exercising empathetic conversation. Being appreciative of the client’s thoughts, feelings and experience is important to meaningful support, but too often I have seen well-intentioned support workers miss the boat when it comes to creating an environment conducive to an empathetic connection. What are some of the common mistakes? Interrupting is a big one. Sometimes it is to provide advice or try to provide a solution or make suggestions when it is unsolicited. I think some support workers think this is helpful and uses their time better. But if recovery is a process and a journey then we need to take time to let it unravel. This may mean multiple interactions over time. Making demands of people rather than honoring decision-making and empowering people with information that they can discern is another common mistake. Part of recovery is respecting that people will make mistakes and then engaging with them to debrief on what has been learned. I think it is often out of these protective instincts that I have seen workers order, direct, warn, threat, moralize or preach to their clients. The action of making a demand on someone is laden with authority and power that disrespect the equality that is necessary in empathetic conversations. Another big one for me is judgment. We all have our personal values, [...]
Last night I had the chance to ride along with an outreach team in Calgary. It was pretty darn cold…less than -25C with the wind chill. I love doing outreach. It takes me back to my days doing community development work and street outreach. It helps me stay grounded in that part of the reality of the front line. The people I did outreach with were two fabulous women. I’d like to dedicate this blog to the elements of them that I was so impressed by. Grace – they honored the people they served through their action, tone of voice and commitment. Dignity – they humbly made people feel worthy of service and reinforced the importance of how much each person deserved a safe place out of the cold. Patience – they demonstrated the capacity to accept delay, trouble, suffering, strife, belligerence, anger, incoherence, difficulty communicating, poor hygiene – and more – without ever getting angry or upset. Humility – they viewed their contributions with meekness and humbleness, genuinely deflecting praise. Logistics – they navigated calls for service with precision in how best to get through traffic and around the city in the most efficient and effective way possible. Solution Focus – they seamlessly and without intrusion focused discussions on the best way to meet each person’s needs, while also reinforcing longer term ways to end their homelessness. Politeness – more than good manners, they genuinely embodied respectful and considerate behavior with people calling the van, passengers, colleagues and other [...]
For more than a decade, in the role of policy-development, as a service practitioner and as a researcher, I have been investigating and trying to understand the allure of Transitional Housing. I have been interested in the outputs and outcomes that Transitional Housing can demonstrate relative to other housing models. I have been interested in the planning processes used for Transitional Housing – from the needs analysis to understanding the population to be served to securing financing to the urban planning and architectural features of Transitional Housing. From a system perspective I have been working to comprehend where it fits in, for which populations and under what circumstances. Throughout my travels I have seen different models of Transitional Housing and different approaches to delivering services in Transitional Housing. I have seen congregate Transitional Housing – some for individuals, some for families, and some blended – that range in size from a handful of units to hundreds of units. I have seen scattered site Transitional Housing through head-lease arrangements. I have seen rented motel rooms that service providers have structured and labeled as Transitional Housing. I have visited some Transitional Housing that has a very fixed length of stay such as 6 months, 1 year or 2 years; and have also visited some Transitional Housing where people can stay indefinitely so long as they are progressing towards a future transition (though what that means is, in my experience, rarely defined). I have seen population-specific Transitional Housing such as for veterans, youth, [...]
This is a very personal blog about my journey to accept my mental illness and to acknowledge how it has helped me to become a much better person, practitioner and teacher. We all seek meaning in life. We want to do things that enrich us emotionally, intellectually, socially, recreationally and spiritually. Indeed, the world can seem like a cold place when we don’t have this multi-faceted enrichment. By most measures, I have had a very successful life. I get to work on homeless and housing issues, which is my passion. I set up and provided direction to one of the most successful housing programs in the world — according to the World Habitat Awards. Work I have created has been honored with numerous national and international awards. My business partner John, who is the Founding Partner and COO of OrgCode, is also one of my best friends on the planet. I have been blessed with a terrific family that is very supportive about how I live my life and what I do for a living. I get to tour around and deliver keynote speeches, seminars, training workshops and the like to people who are also trying to make a difference. I get to do meaningful research and quench my insatiable appetite for knowledge by being engaged in academia. Although I am not even 40, yet, that’s another measure of relative achievement that, perhaps, accounts for my sense of urgency. That is the public presentation of Iain De Jong that many [...]
My thanks for the blog request on this specific topic. I’d be hard pressed to think of a housing support worker/case manager that deliberately tries to make the life of any client worse. People go into this type of work because they tend to want to help others. But I think we need to take time to reflect on when helping becomes hurting – even when it is unintentional…when our actions aren’t actually helpful at all. Understanding the differences between enabling our clients and supporting our clients is an important part of self-reflection as a practitioner and is an essential distinction to be made in the type of help we are providing to people. I look at support as the art and act of encouraging a person to achieve goals. It is the function of working with the clients we have the privilege of assisting, not working for them. We want the individual to deliberate before making decisions, have information to make informed choices, and to experience and understand the consequences of their actions. In a supportive relationship, we want our clients to accept full responsibility for their life – to increase their self-awareness and self-management to the point where they can reframe and rebuild their life. Through supportive relationships we are respectfully presenting opportunities – at times challenging opportunities – for positive life changes while increasing opportunities for growth, learning and awareness. I look at enabling as the act of encouraging or failing to prevent a person from engaging [...]
We’re winding down another year here at OrgCode. Heck, we’re even going to shut the door and turn off the phones for a week between Christmas and the New Year and that will be a first since we re-booted the company in Q4 2009. God rest us merry gentlemen and gentlewomen. It’s hard to believe that it has been two years since John Whitesell and I shook hands to grab the reins of OrgCode together – and a real honor for me given John had been leading the company as Managing Director for over 25 years. Taking a retrospective gander at 2011 there are some things that stand out for me as great opportunities as well as lessons learned. They are: Our professional integrity remains intact. We truly want to be catalysts for better outcomes and when we were challenged in a “bait and switch” RFP to be the mouthpiece for somebody else’s agenda after we won the project, we noisily declined to continue and ended the engagement. If you listen carefully, sleepless nights can be informative in and of themselves. The National Alliance to End Homelessness still rocks. I just totally dig their staff and everything the organization stands for. The fact that they decided to let me start guest blogging this year is and honor and icing on the proverbial cake. Speaking of blogs, I finally got the hang of taking point for the OrgCode blog this year. The 10 part series on the essential elements of successful [...]
I have been a funder. I have been a practitioner. I remain a researcher. I am a faculty member at a rather excellent university. I am now a consultant. I am going to do my best to not make this blog a rant. In my attempt to remain professional, allow me to make this an open letter to all funders of homeless and housing programs for marginalized populations, as well as administrators of community-based grants programs. Dear Funder, I’ve been meaning to write for sometime now. I know I see you in crowded meetings when there is a new initiative to be launched. About once or twice at other times in the year you call or visit to make sure I am using your money wisely. I get a lot of directive-type emails from you (which are way too long for the number of hours in the day by the way). Truth is, I have missed you. You are important to my work. For some reason, though, I think you think I only exist to give you stats. Sometimes I feel like you don’t know me at all. Day in and day out, deep in the trenches, we work our butts off to meet the needs of people who, for better or worse, society have decided should have their needs met by us. It is a privilege and I don’t want you to think we are ungrateful of our responsibility. Money didn’t drive us to do this work. We felt [...]
Harm reduction approaches can be seen as controversial when working with many populations, including unaccompanied youth. Some will cite reasons pertaining to the illicit nature of certain substances, the age of maturity, psychosocial development and the like. Others hold on to the “just say no” mantra. Harm reduction has gotten a bad rap in some circles because it is not well understood. Some erroneously think it is willy-nilly state sanctioned consumption and participation in risky behavior without consequences. Let’s try working with this definition: Harm reduction is an action-oriented response through policy and programs that reduces the harmful effects of behavior. It uses a range of approaches that aim to be non-judgmental. Harm reduction employs strategies that increase skills, resources, knowledge and supports for individuals, their families and communities. The individual, their family and community can thereby make decisions to be safer and healthier. A harm reduction approach is pragmatic. It aims to acknowledge the dignity of all people. It is neutral – it neither condones nor condemns the activity that is causing the harm. It focuses on the harm to the individual and the community. It prioritizes the ability to meet immediate needs, while also encouraging a range of intervention options (which can include reduction, less risky use, and working towards abstinence if that is the individual’s desire). It believes that people who have experience with higher risk behaviors have an important voice in shaping programs. In addition, harm reduction approaches have public health benefits, decrease policing costs, and [...]
PART EIGHT: Professional Works Gets Professional Results Successful housing programs have a professional orientation. Well-trained staff deliver the housing program. Successful housing programs tend not to be those operated in a charity context where “well intentioned” is sufficient to get the job done. There is too much at stake, and generally too much complexity for a layperson without training to help a client achieve long-term sustainability. I am not anti-charity. There is a time and place for it. And in fact it is often charitable organizations that hire the professional staff to deliver the housing program. The mistake, however, is when untrained staff are directly involved in client interactions. Truth is, it can do more harm than good. With the properly trained staff, housing programs get better outcomes. Here are some of the essential ingredients for ensuring your housing program is provided by professionals who get professional results. Start with the Right Job Description I love to take a poll when I do training about whether the job people are in with their organization is exactly how it sounded on paper when they applied. My non-scientific polling results would suggest that between 90-100% of people in any given audience say the job is different than how it looked in the job description. I encourage organizations to pull together professionally polished and accurate job descriptions for their housing staff team. (You can learn more about the staff compliment for a successful housing team here.) Be clear on the qualifications that you [...]
PART THREE: The Structure of the Housing Team and Its Functions Successful housing programs have three different types of positions: Team Leader – supervises the work, coaches team members and creates opportunities for professional development, assigns households to different case managers, sets priorities and ensures fidelity to the approach. (Read more about Team Leaders, their importance and why they need specialized training.) Housing Case Manager – provides direct support to households (individuals or families) that have been housed and works with them to create an individualized service plan that will help them achieve housing and life stability. Housing Locator – works directly with landlords, property management firms, etc. to secure available units for the housing program. (There is an entire future blog dedicated to how to make this work.) My experience suggests that in most cases social workers tend to make crappy landlords and landlords tend to make crappy social workers. While there will always be exceptions, I would argue that keeping them separate functions helps. The best Housing Locators I have ever met, for example, are not schooled in social work or other helping professions. They know how to speak “landlord” and how to make the business transaction part of the housing program work. But I digress…and again getting ahead of myself and a future blog. Each housing case manager can serve a MAXIMUM of 20 households at any one time. Any more than that and you have a list of people that you aim to serve, but truly [...]