Marvin

I had long knew of Marvin. Cynthia of the National Alliance to End Homelessness put a name to him when we did a session together at the summer conference a while back. You know Marvin too.

Who is Marvin?

Marvin is the guy that pops up in your rules for your program. Maybe not by the name "Marvin". But you have served Marvin and created rules because of him. 

It goes like this...

Once upon a time there was a guy named Marvin. He did some outlandish shit. You created a new rule because of Marvin. Everyone now must adhere to the rule because of Marvin even though it makes no sense that they do so.

For example: Marvin lit some paper on fire. Now you have a rule that no one is allowed to have a lighter in your shelter or drop-in center or food program. People must turn over their lighter upon coming on the premises. If they do not, services are terminated.

OR...

Marvin once clogged the toilet with toilet paper. Now every person who is going to use the toilet has to ask for toilet paper before going into the john. 

OR...

Marvin once wore a Guns'n'Roses t-shirt that other shelter guests found offensive. Now, no rock t-shirts may be worn on premises.

OR...

Marvin once re-enacted the Tom Cruise scene from Risky Business. Now no one is allowed to walk around in underpants or socks or lip-sync.

All of the above are real examples that I have seen in my travels. No joke. And somewhat appalling. But the fact of the matter remains that many service providers and even government funders have rules that were born from anomalies rather than what happens on a day to day basis. The impact of it is such that some people experiencing homelessness are not served - or not served well - because you still have Marvin rules.

So do me a favor (and probably Cynthia too given it was her idea to talk about the Marvin Rule in the first place): go through your policies and procedures. Go line by line. See if there is anything in there that has more to do with Marvin and less to do with most people that you see and serve every single day. Deal with the one off situations as one off situations. Delete any rules that are actually just because of Marvin.

A Letter to Myself of 15 Years Ago

This week I am leading another Leadership Academy on Ending Homelessness. We sold out again. It is a great honour that so many people want to hone their leadership skills on this important social issue. As I was preparing and reflecting on the materials to be delivered this week, I wrote a letter to myself that I wish I had 15 years ago.

Dear Me from 15 Years Ago,

You struggle to listen to others at this stage of your professional development. Maybe you will listen to yourself from the future. Here are important lessons that you should learn sooner rather than later.

Leadership does not mean being superior. It means helping the people that follow you be super. You are smart. But no one likes to be bludgeoned by your intellect. The smartest person in the room is the first to be ignored if you NEED everyone in the room to know you are the smartest person.

If you inspire people, that is leadership. If you feel it necessary to order people, that is a dictatorship. Know how things turn out for dictators? They are obsessed with losing power to the point that they bully others. Don’t do that.

Think first in and last out each workday is the way to go? Working multiple weekends a month? It isn’t. To work your best you must take time to rest. You may think you are impressing others with your commitment to 12 hour days and coming in on weekends. Soon your friendships will fall apart and your marriage will change – and not for the better.

Others need you to demonstrate humility and confidence. You don’t understand what that really means yet. So instead you demonstrate humiliation and arrogance at times. That is a mistake. Humiliating others makes you look weak. Being arrogant makes you an asshole.

For whatever reason, people are choosing to follow your leadership. Stop complaining. Leadership is not a chore or burden. It is a privilege.  When people ask you how things are going, focus on a positive development that has happened or a new idea that you are working through. Do not answer, “How are you doing?” with “Busy”.

Listen. It is an underappreciated part of communication and leadership. Spend 60% of your time listening and 40% of your time talking (unless, of course, people are asking you to talk all day). Speak at invitation and at strategic times only. Leaders do not spend all of their time listening to their own voice.

Stop being worried about people leaving you or your organization. Train them so well that they can leave and have an impact on other organizations. Treat them so well they never want to.

People being afraid of you is not working. The people that are following you need to be fearless. Not fearful. Know the difference.

Want to measure the bottom line? Start measuring the outcome of your work, not wondering about the income of your salary. As soon as you learn that this is about making a difference and not about making money, everything will change.

Be brave enough to not only make mistakes but to own them as well. If you are pretending to be perfect you will alienate others around you. Encourage others to make mistakes too, including people that report to you. Do not punish people for trying. Praise them and ask what they are learning.

Competition is bullshit in leadership. Creating competition amongst your followers will only get already competitive people going, and mediocre and low performers to quit. Tearing each other down will only bring all of us nowhere fast.

Find time to be still. Be quiet. Write out your thoughts. Carve time out of your schedule to do these very things. You think this is a waste of time, but you will learn this is key to innovation, reflection, understanding, and deepening your awareness.

Ask for forgiveness when it is necessary. You will harm people. Sometimes intentionally. Often not. Nonetheless, empathise and offer a heartfelt apology. And if you don’t understand the value of forgiveness, think of one of the many things people would forgive you for and measure the value you place on wanting that forgiveness.

Let go of the small stuff you have no control over. Losing sleep over things that you cannot influence makes you a worse leader, not a better one.  Influence the big picture and the overall direction. Spend less time in the weeds.

And finally, learn to love your work. Find joy in the privilege to do what you do. If you stop feeling in love, move on and let someone else lead.

One Big Thing

Empathy is a difficult thing to practice. How do we honestly go about having a true identification with, or vicarious experience of the thoughts, feelings, or attitudes of another? If you have never been chronically homeless before, in which ways can you go about deepening your understanding of what it is like to move into housing and go through the radical and disruptive change that comes with doing so?

That's right - radical and disruptive change. Think of any big change you want to make in your own life. Bet it sounds great...the outcome that is. Conceptually, we LOVE change. The practice of change, though, is really, really difficult. It is no wonder, then, that for a person or family experiencing chronic homelessness the concept of being housed is a welcome one that is likely to stir up a range of emotions from elation to fear (sometimes concurrently). But the practice of staying housed is a really difficult one. 

Let's explore why a little deeper - and then I have a request for you.

If you have been homeless for a long time, and have a disabling condition, but you have remained alive, there comes a time psychologically when you are no longer working to get yourself out of homelessness. There's like a switch that goes off. And once that switch is flipped you go from trying to escape homelessness to trying to survive or even thrive within homelessness. Your day to day routine is one of being the best person experiencing homelessness you can be. You know where to get food. You know where to attend to hygiene needs. You know where to get clothes. You know where to hang out. 

Along comes you (or someone like you) who, in a nutshell says, "Do you want housing?" and to that person who has experienced homelessness for a long time this is, in many instances, going to sound conceptually like a really good idea. If you were that person who has thrived within homelessness, you can likely see the benefits of preparing what you want to eat rather than what is served on that day. If you were that person, you can see the benefits of using your own toilet and shower rather than sharing one with others or signing up for your turn. If you were that person, you can likely see the benefits of locking your own door to feel safer. If you were that person, you can likely see the benefits of determining your own schedule of when you will go to sleep and when you will rise. 

None of this means there isn't concern or suspicion. None of this means there is no anxiety. However, the idea of putting this change into practice is alluring and feels worth doing.

Then it happens. And the transition is a hard one. Yes, some of the benefits are realized. But it is also really hard to sustain the change. Why? Because there is a complete disruption of routine and so much of what the person that was homeless knew how to do to keep themselves alive and even thrive. Now there is budgeting for groceries and light bulbs and toilet paper. Now there is cleaning up after meals and the apartment as a whole. Now there is loneliness. Now there are challenges not foreseen.

That same person may want to go back to that which was most familiar - homelessness. That same person who was so excited to have housing may be in a position to give up the thing there were excited to have in order to go back to life before the change. Because change is hard.

Now the request for you to try and increase your empathy. 

I want you to think about one BIG change you need to make in your life. To determine what this type of change needs to be, it has to meet the following conditions: it has to be something important to you; it has to be the sort of change that will disrupt your life in some way; it has to be something that would be of benefit to you; and, it has to be hard to accomplish. Some examples of the sort of change you may want to make: repairing a relationship; investing more time to be with your children; maintaining a higher level of cleanliness in your house and car and office; losing weight; quitting smoking and/or drinking; forming a relationship/friendship with someone you have always wanted to have a connection with; maintaining a chronic health condition better.

Then, I want you commit to doing it for 100 days minimum. I want you to keep track of your progress and your setbacks. I want you to spend time discerning how you feel throughout the change process. As you are comfortable, I want you to share your change with others, and all that goes with it. I want you to own every time you feel like giving up and going back to how your life was before you started the change process, and what you did to keep going. And then I want you to try and relate this back to how a chronically homeless person may feel in trying to sustain the change they are going through when they move into housing.

Remember, change is hard - and if you get through 100 days you will have to keep working to sustain the change still. For example, did you know that 6 out of 7 people that have a heart attack return to the lifestyle that caused their heart attack within 18 months of having their heart attack? That's how hard change is to sustain - even when it is a matter of life or death.

And here is my change that I will own out loud in this blog for transparency and which has been an issue in my life ever since I broke my hip a number of years back - I am going to take the steps necessary to lose 38 pounds. I need to for the sake of my health. It will be hard because I most often eat in restaurants and spend a lot of time on planes in a sedentary environment. It will come with sacrifice because when I am home I would much rather spend time with my kids than go out and exercise. I have had setbacks in previous attempts. I will see how close I move the needle towards achieving the goal within the first 100 days. Through my struggles to achieve this, I hope to deepen my empathy with just how hard change really is to accomplish. What will you do?

Hope

Hope is the only currency we really deal in. Not false promises. Not dreams of a better day. Hope is a nuanced belief that life is worth living; that tomorrow can be better than today; that next week can be better than this week; that next month can be better than this month; that next year can be better than this year. Hope is about leaning into expectation, while concurrently creating the reality of that expectation. To have hope is to take meaningful action toward a desire future. As a belief, hope requires us to move from a crossing of the fingers and wishing upon a star to doing the work to create the desired future we want.

Hope is difficult to quantify. There are not any reliable “hope” performance metrics. How many times did you help a family or person experiencing homelessness find hope? is not a common reporting question – nor should it be. Yet, if you don’t believe and support hope for every person you serve, you are likely in the wrong profession. You can’t say you support hope for some people you serve, but not for others. You can’t decide that some people are lost causes. The moment you think some people will never escape homelessness for stable housing is the same moment that you likely reached your tipping point of burn-out. Hope is essential for trauma-informed care and the spiritual scarring that comes with living through an exacerbated traumatic cycle. The impacts of the trauma may never totally heal, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to abandon hope or to think that recovery is hopeless.

Hope is one of the foundations of a recovery-orientation to this work. A future where people move forward from the impacts of their mental illness is one that requires hope. Reclaiming capabilities, rights, responsibilities, roles and the like will not happen without hope. Hope makes us champions of a future not yet realized. Ask yourself not only if you believe in hope – but if you are living hope. And if you are not, then time for deep reflection on how you put hope into practice.

The Three Metrics I Admire Most

When a community starts wondering what data to collect and look at when measuring progress to end homelessness, it is easy to generate a number of pieces of data that may be interesting to look at. Before you know it, there are over a hundred fields...the proverbial elephant being a horse drawn by committee. And what happens? The data does not get captured. Or it is inconsistently captured. Or there are time delays in data entry. Overall - a bunch of crap. 

So if you want to simplify this - the Brown M&Ms if you will - focus on measuring three things really well.

1. How long are people staying homeless?

This is not how long people have been homeless and using YOUR services. This is not how long people are homeless from the time you connect them to a housing program until the date they move in. This is a measure of their entire homeless episode. 

Once you get this data of high quality, then you can start to look at other factors such as whether household composition, age, gender, race, acuity level, place of receiving services, etc seems to be influencing whether people are having shorter or longer experiences of homelessness.

2. How many people have a positive destination out of homelessness?

What this really means is how many people moved into housing (with or without your help) or reunited to a safe and appropriate housing situation with a relative. Start by looking at the number of people. Once you have that data of high quality, look at the number of households (a family unit has more than one person). Then, when the data on the number of people and the data on the number of households is of good quality, you can choose to dig deeper and look at things like the size of the household, the composition of the household, demographics, acuity level, regional or neighbourhood analysis of where people are moving, which landlords or property management firms people are most likely to be housed through, etc. You could also look at what percentage of all people that were experiencing homeless within a prescribed period of time found a positive destination.

3. Of all those that had a positive destination out of homelessness, how many came back into homelessness?

You need to know the data from point 2 above in order to figure out the answer to this important data point. You want to know which people that had a positive housing destination touch the homeless service delivery system again, either through shelters or street outreach. Then you can go back to point 1 and look at how long people are homeless if they come back into homelessness. This would help you understand whether or not people are being rapidly re-stabilized into housing if they lose housing. You can also dig deeper to understand whether things like acuity level, neighbourhood they move into, composition of household, demographics, specific landlords, who the support provider was, etc. seem to be a more influencing factor in your community of when people return to homelessness.

10 Critical Questions for Every Shelter and Shelter System

At National Alliance to End Homelessness Conferences the past couple years, in our training and transforming of shelter providers and shelter systems, and one of the foci of our upcoming How to Be an Awesome Shelter Learning Clinic in Dallas, are these 10 critical questions that every shelter and shelter system should be asking themselves:

1. Is shelter a process or a destination?

When shelters are a process, the focus is on housing from the moment they show up seeking services. It starts with diversion. When that is not possible, there is unrelenting focus on getting people into housing as quickly as possible through self-resolution or through housing assistance programs. When shelter is seen as a destination, the focus is more on programming within the shelter that can inadvertently result in people staying in shelter longer – and sometimes becoming so integrated into the programming and comforts of shelter that they begin to see shelter a home.

2. Are the people getting access to shelter those that need it the most or those that were lucky enough to get it?

Many communities are starting to wrestle with this very question if they are integrating shelter access into their coordinated entry process. Homelessness has a longitudinal bias – the longer you are homeless, the better you are at navigating and surviving within homelessness. This includes knowing how the shelter system works, where to show up, and the behaviour expectations when seeking shelter. This does not mean the most acute are being sheltered. It means those that know how to navigate the shelter system are being sheltered.

3. Do we attempt to heal or fix people?

Shelters quickly become therapeutic incarceration when there are attempts to heal or fix the issues a person or family presents with, rather than focusing on housing. Remarkably imperfect people are fantastic at being housed. A deficit-based approach to shelter places the emphasis not on housing, but on things that are best focused on once the person or family gets housed, not before. Are some people or families going to need a lot of support? Yes. But thinking issues need to be resolved to get someone ready for housing is misguided.

4. Do we provide a social service? Or are we exercising social control?

It can be uncomfortable to look at the rules of a shelter and how they are applied. Why? Because you come face to face with the reality that while you often remark that you are non-judgmental, strength-based, person-centered, and/or trauma-informed, your rules and practices surrounding those rules prove otherwise. Compliance-based sheltering essentially says, "Act the way I tell you to in order for me to provide you what you need." As many shelters we have worked with come to realize, you can focus on six or seven expectations rather than pages of rules. And the good thing about expectations is that they are socialized rather than enforced.

5. Does the built form and layout promote dignity and decrease conflict?

Often the provision of shelter occurs in a building that was never purposely designed or built to be a shelter. And if the building was purposely designed and built to be a shelter, I often am perplexed by the decisions that are made which often have to do with what is easiest or best for staff – or the color palette or design features that middle class folk may like – rather than examining what trauma-informed building design tells us is best by way of common spaces, corners, lighting, color choices and the like.

6. Do we believe that homelessness should be short and non-recurring – and that shelters have a role in making that happen?

Too often shelters are seen – by themselves and by others – as a place of last resort. It is accepted as dumping ground for hospitals, corrections, older adult care, youth aging out of care and so on. If shelters really want to play an important role in a system of care they need to stop being anyone’s last choice or dumping ground. They need to own the space of being the place of first choice for people with a housing stabilization crisis as the premiere opportunity to become re-housed again as quickly as possible.

7. Do we restrict services only in limited circumstances, in a transparent manner, and for justifiable reasons?

The reasons a person or family can be asked to leave a shelter are quite varied, sometimes within the same community working with the same population group. The length of time they are asked to leave is also variable. It raises the question of why we are asking people to leave in the first place. Is it supposed to be punishment? Retribution? Rehabilitative? Will taking away a life necessity like the roof over a person’s head make them more likely to behave to your requirements in the future? What if their inability to follow your rules is because of a brain injury, mental illness, or chemical dependency? Sometimes the argument raised by shelter providers is that they have dozens of other guests, as well as staff that they need to keep safe. In other words, they are willing to sacrifice the one for the many. But where is that person to go? If they die tonight because of circumstances related to not being sheltered, can you live with that on your conscience? A high performing shelter system of care ensures that there are some shelter beds for those that would otherwise not be able to conform to behavioural expectations elsewhere.

8. Is there any group of people we automatically disqualify from services?

There is no shortage of exclusionary criteria that one sees in shelter systems across the developed world. Sometimes it is a family shelter that does not accept teenage boys. Sometimes it is a shelter that does not appropriately engage or shelter people based upon their self-identified gender, and insist on supporting people based upon biological sex. Sometimes it is married couples that cannot sleep in the same shelter unless they can produce a marriage certificate. Sometimes it is registered sex offenders or sexual predators. And so on. If not your shelter, where is the person or family you are excluding supposed to be sheltered? And where there are very practical considerations (like, say, a father that cannot be in a family shelter because he is a sex offender and would violate the conditions of his release by being in proximity to certain people), do you have creative solutions like motels that you can activate solely for that purpose?

9. Do we have professional staff with suitable training?

Homelessness is maybe the only industry where we continue to confuse a big heart with a big head – that somehow if you care enough you are qualified. The argument usually goes that somebody has to do something, and better that untrained but sympathetic people do the work instead of nothing. And then we end up killing people with kindness or incompetence. This is akin to me finding busy emergency rooms and going to practice medicine at those places, even though I am not a medical doctor, because the wait times are too long and there are people suffering. Other shelters hire people that once used their shelter, but with no additional training. The thinking is that these people are experts in homelessness and sheltering because they have been homeless and stayed in shelter. That is like me saying I am qualified and should be able to surgically remove your gall bladder because I have had my gall bladder out. If shelters are going to do what they need to do to help end homelessness, they need to professionalize their staffing with the right training.

10. Do we measure what we do and make refinements based upon data?

Only three measures matter in sheltering: how long were people homeless; how many moved on to a positive housing destination; and, how many came back. When we focus on things like bed nights or meals served within the shelter, we are focusing on the wrong things. The measure of a shelter is how the shelter ends homelessness, not how busy it was in sheltering.