Mountains
The size of the mountain you have to climb is secondary to the fact that there is a mountain in front of you at all.
I was asking around for blog ideas recently, and it turned into a venting session for many. Anecdotally, I know of many who are feeling overwhelmed these days, and know of three people that have quit or resigned in the last month.
In life, and this work, the heaviest thing you will ever have to lift is your own spirits.
So you - yes you - person reading this blog, I want you to know that you matter and I want to say thanks.
You matter because you reach out to find more information on how to be better at ending homelessness. You are not resting on your laurels. You read the blog probably as part of that journey towards making yourself better (or because you think I am an idiot and it is validating to position your moral superiority against my lame ideas every week).
And I want to say thanks because people like you who read the blog make the blog worth writing. If this thing didn't have an audience there would really be no point in doing it.
No rah-rah speech here, but let me say a few things that may help you prepare to conquer that mountain and to lift your own spirits.
1. Our sector has some of the brightest, smartest people you will ever meet. These are individuals that could likely work in a range of other industries, excel at it, and make way more money. But they chose this industry. We should be grateful that we get to work with really, really smart people. I know it rubs off on guys like me. Maybe you too.
2. If compassion was quantifiable, we would need a lot of numbers to represent it in this sector. I am not talking about sympathy or charitable do-goodery. I am talking about people that work in this sector who are truly present from a place of empathy in this work not because they see themselves as greater than those we have the privilege of serving, but because they are seen as equals to those we serve.
3. When you look at the big picture, we are doing way better than we used to be doing. Even with chronic numbers creeping up slightly, the big picture is a positive one. When faced with a crappy economy, tight rental markets, terrible access to mental health services and homeless-creation-factories like prisons and the foster care system doing their best to give us a steady supply of new people to support, you have been up to the challenge.
4. You stare down a challenge and say, "bring it". Not enough money for resources? Landlord resources getting more scarce? Turnover in staff? Scant affordable housing resources? Folks like you get out of bed in the morning and are not defeated by it. You say, "bring it" because while you are not ready with an answer, you are ready for a challenge. We are a scrappy, rag-tag bunch that does this work well because we dig in to find answers rather than bellyache about problems.
5. You know what you are brilliant at. Why? Because you have endured discovering all of the things you are average or even lousy at. You have discovered much about yourself as you have done this work. Some of that learning about yourself was difficult, unforgiving and painful. But you learned and got better, and stuck around. There is no 'teachers copy' with all of the answers to how to end homelessness, so you invest what is necessary to learn a lit bit more and a lit bit more to get better and better. You compare notes with others and realize you aren't that bad at this work. So you stick around for another day.
Hey you - you are awesome. Don't forget it.
Radical Acceptance
The practice of radical acceptance is not easy. It demands that regardless of background or circumstance we find strengths and live our empathy. It demands that we see people and their potential, not their past. It challenges us to examine our own potential biases because of our own values and beliefs and rise beyond those to enter into relationship with others who live their lives differently than how we live ours.
Radical acceptance means we acknowledge that life is what it is. We cannot force change in others. We are limited in how much influence we can have in particular circumstances. We cannot change the past. We have to grow from it, and at times, grow with it.
Suffering is what you do with that pain and the interpretation you put on the pain. Suffering is optional; pain is not. The people we serve have pain, and their pain can be difficult to accept without judgment. It’s difficult to accept what you don’t want to be true. And it’s more difficult to not accept. Not accepting pain brings suffering to those we serve and to ourselves. People we serve have a history and often current realities of pain. That doesn’t mean they should suffer. We serve those that have been rejected by other systems, other services, themselves and their families. We serve those that have rejected offers of assistance. We serve those where the easy thing to do is see deficits.
When we truly live and practice from a place of radical acceptance, it is freeing for us as the support provider. We enter into a relationship based upon an understanding of equality, not a relationship between healer and wounded. We see and live our own humanity in being present in the humanity of others, believing and embracing that everyone should have a future that is not dictated by their past.
Every now and then I fool myself into thinking we don’t need to talk about radical acceptance anymore. And I am wrong. Last week, for example, I struggled (and became internally frustrated) at the inability for people to see housing prioritization based upon people with deeper needs first. At issue in this situation was a strong reluctance on the part of some to house people with substance use disorders if there was a “motivated” person without a substance use disorder that could be served first; to serve people with criminal backgrounds – including involvement in things like pedophilia – when they thought a “motivated” person without a criminal background should be served first.
What becomes most difficult to me in situations such as what I described above is that the barrier is one of feelings, not logic. I can lay out facts related to serving people with higher needs, and point to policy direction that reinforces doing just that. But what I cannot breakthrough using logic is the intractability that comes with a deserving and undeserving poor.
Where do we go from here? What is the solution to this? It is my belief that we need to not only practice radical acceptance, we need to talk about it too. We make assumptions that others that do this work are on the same page as us when it comes to morals and beliefs. Are they? There is only one way to find out. And where there is distance between us, it behooves us to find out why and whether our collective interests in ending homelessness are, in fact, compatible.
3 Things I Look For When Monitoring
“When you go into a community or organization,” one of the people I mentor asked me the other day, “what are the first things you look for to know if people have bought into ending homelessness?”
Great question.
There are three things:
Leadership
Data
Morale
It all starts with leadership for me. I am not just talking about position power that comes from titles and reinforced through hierarchy. No, what I am looking for is a leader-full organization that has leaders in all sorts of positions who have a shared vision of what it takes to end homelessness. In these types of communities and organizations, they explicitly talk about their shared guiding principles and standards of service. They seek accountability and marry that with realistic optimism. They are collective problem-solvers who steadfastly stay engaged in the mission without being distracted by so many other things that could take them off course.
The importance of leadership (and the frequent absence of it) is one of the main reasons why we started the Leadership Academy on Ending Homelessness a few years ago. Leaders succeed when they are engaged in self-knowledge (the kind you don’t necessarily find on bookshelves), have awareness of others and how others impact them, and when they are systems thinkers. Of all of the conferences and such that a person can go to in any given year, at least some time and attention should be paid to investing in leadership development. If you are interested in the Leadership Academy, you can find more information and register for it here.
The second thing I know needs to be in place for proof that people have bought into ending homelessness is data. And I mean an unrelenting almost obsessed fixation on data. Not just any data – the right data. What do I mean?
Well, it is easy to go to the three performance metrics that matter most: i) Length of homelessness; ii) Positive destinations out of homelessness; iii) Returns to homelessness.
But I think we can go beyond this and still not end up too cute or in the weeds too far. I like data to have context. Show me how you are faring compared to previous time intervals or in comparison to other organizations or communities of comparable size and volume of funding. That is a big part of it.
The next important thing related to data for me are other elements of quality. For example, show me what the data looks like from different acuity bands, or conduct a gender or race analysis of performance using the data - as examples.
Finally, related to data, I look for a community or organization to demonstrate that they are making adjustments and improvements to performance based upon the data that they have acquired – and that they are using THEIR data on a REGULAR basis. THEIR as in they have accepted ownership of the data and what it says and are not waiting for someone else to interpret their data. REGULAR as in there are preset intervals for a data analysis plan to be activated.
Then there is morale which seems more intangible than the other three, though to me there are clear indicators that provide evidence of morale being high or low or somewhere in between. The first thing I inquire about is staff retention and staff acquisition, which is really getting at whether the staff tend to stay in their jobs and whether the organization or the work within the community attracts top tier talent to available positions. The next thing I look at is burnout, compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. I want to know how the work is impacting those that are doing the work.
By way of morale, I am sensitive to the language that people use when talking about the work and the people that they serve. Are they trying to impose their values and beliefs on others? Are they frustrated, angry or resentful of program participants? Do they legitimately engage in solving problems, or are they more interested in naming problems without solving them or looking to others to always be the answer?
Also, with morale, I look to see if people feel positively challenged by the work itself. This helps say something about commitment and professional development and growth. There is ample proof that when people feel challenged by the work they are more inclined to stay involved and engaged in the work.
Finally, for morale, I look to whether there is a collective, collaborative approach to the work. Does ending homelessness translate to every position on the front line? Or is that something the mucky-mucks on the 6th floor talk about in the admin building but seems foolish to those that are engaged with people who are homeless daily? If it isn’t translating to the frontline, there is a problem with morale.
1 Needs 6
1 shelter bed added to your system of care requires 6 housing resources per year to avoid warehousing people in shelter. And that, my friends, is the part of the discussion that is lost as communities wrestle with expansion of shelter, sanctioned campgrounds, safe parking, and other forms of sheltering. If you are going to add a shelter bed (and maybe you need to in your community), you need to think about how people are going to get out.
1:6 isn't the right ratio in all communities, but it is a good rule of thumb. If you want each bed in the shelter to turn over once every 60 days, then it will turn over 6 times in a year. Each turnover needs a pathway to a positive destination. You can fiddle with the ratio all you want, it will not change the fact that if you do not resource shelter exits at the same time that you resource shelter expansion, you are doomed.
What does this mean practically speaking? Shelter expansion - where warranted - needs to happen alongside a conversation about increases in Rapid ReHousing (or other time limited subsidies) and more Permanent Supportive Housing. If you don't, it is like the hospital that continues to make its emergency room larger without tackling the fact that each person in the emergency room is going to need access to a doctor, and some will need access to more intensive supports, treatment and care. A bigger emergency room without throughput to physicians isn't good healthcare, it is just more waiting space for people to get sicker. A bigger shelter system without throughput to housing resources isn't good sheltering, it is just more waiting space for people to get sicker too.
The era of ending homelessness has, at times, taken on an anti-shelter vibe. It should not. Shelters play a vital role in the crisis response system and are integral to ending homelessness. To play that role, however, the shelter must have an unrelenting housing focus in all that it does. Maybe it is possible to get the ratio to 1:8 or even 1:12 if there is considerable movement towards housing in the shelter. But that would require considerable investment in housing resources along with the investment in shelter.
We can quickly forget that shelters are intended to not be a destination, but rather, a process by which people get housed again. If you add a shelter bed without thinking about (and resourcing) pathways out of shelter, well, things in your community just got that much harder when it comes to ending homelessness. In summary, if you are having the community conversation about shelter expansion, make sure you are having the conversation about shelter exits at the same time. Otherwise, you have just made the job of ending homelessness more likely to be impossible than reality.
Place-Making
Place-making is an intentional process designed to help the newly housed person connect with and take pride in their apartment. Without place-making, connectivity to the apartment is one of luck. We can increase the odds of connection - and by extension decrease the odds of a person damaging or vacating the apartment unit - by actively and intentionally engaging in place-making.
Place-making capitalizes on a person's assets, inspiration and potential. The intention is to use the apartment and surrounding neighbourhood to promote health, happiness and well-being. Here are four ideas to increase the effectiveness of place-making.
Choice
Choice is critical to place-making. Even in tight rental markets, people need to make informed choices on the neighbourhoods and type of apartment they want to dwell within. This doesn't mean choice is carte blanche. There are realities that need to be faced when it comes to affordability, for example, but choosing a place for a person or forcing them to live in a neighbourhood or type of apartment they do not want will not increase their connection to place.
Choice is also fundamental to furnishings. By giving people the ability to pick out their own furnishings rather than providing them a set collection of furnishings increases their connection to the furnishings and the place.
Move In
On the day of move in the support worker should be present at the time the program participant receives their keys. The first words out of the support worker's mouth as they enter the unit should exude positivity, focusing on positively reinforcing the features, qualities and/or location of the unit and why it is a great place.
On the day of move in, the support worker should also assist in cleaning the apartment. This does not make the support worker a maid service. By being proximate, the support worker sees first hand what skills and strengths the person has when it comes to cleaning and maintaining an apartment. When it comes to place-making, ensuring the apartment is clean at time of move-in increases pride and dignity of having the apartment.
Orientation to Building and Surrounding Community
Leaving the program participant on their own to explore the building and community that they have moved into is a missed opportunity for the support worker to increase place-making. By doing the orientation with the program participant there is the opportunity to reinforce features and benefits to the building and community, and help anchor the person to their new surroundings. Positive reinforcement goes a long way to helping people feel a connection to space and place - from where a person collects their mail to a nearby park where they can relax and enjoy the sunshine.
Create a Personal Guest Policy
Shortly after move-in, the support worker should assist the program participant in creating a personal guest policy. Think of it as the Rules of the House. The purpose of the guest policy is to outline things like when people are allowed to visit, what sorts of activities they want or do not want happening in their apartment, and to proactively think of whether they want visitors to touch their things, eat their food or consume their beverages. These aren't the rules of the support worker, so there must be caution in how the support worker reinforces and encourages the writing of the rules. You want to assist the program participant to see this as "My Own Rules."
Interventions vs General Service
In program evaluations and job shadowing as of late, I have seen many very busy frontline workers. In almost all instances they are very well intentioned, dedicated, compassionate people who are trying to make a difference. They are also, in many instances, overwhelmed by the demands of their caseload and the litany of intrusions on their time. No doubt they are busy. But are they effective? How busy a person is should not be confused as a metric of effectiveness.
At the core, what is occurring is the provision of a general service, not a service intervention. More than semantics, the two constructs are quite different.
In a service intervention, three conditions need to be met:
1. There is deliberate action. One might say this is very targeted. The staff are intentionally engaging a smaller group of people with purpose and predetermined objectives rather than waiting for people to come to them or being taken off-track by intrusions or crises of other.
2. There is interference. This sounds negative, so let me explain because it is actually a positive. The worker is intentionally trying to interfere with the homelessness of the client. They are trying to disrupt it. They want it to change. This interference is strength-based and person-centered, but is not person-directed. In other words, there is intention behind the engagement to help move the person forward. It is not coercive nor does it have a hidden agenda. But the worker commits to challenging the status quo. Put another way, the worker is not trying to manage a person's homelessness, they are trying to end it.
3. There is persuasion. This is the only tool the worker should employ to help the client consider and act upon an alternate reality to their homelessness. One would expect to see strong motivational interviewing practices and occasionally some assertive engagement. One would expect to see persistence, patience and creativity in the worker rather than expressions of absolutes. The interactions would be devoid of opinions and advice.
It is easy to get distracted by the "busyness" of the work rather than focusing on the effectiveness of the work. It is a deliberate choice to be intervention driven. It can mean saying no to a number of other distractions. A focus on interventions in service is a commitment to work with a smaller group of people intentionally rather than a larger group of people peripherally. Especially in a shelter or outreach environment that can be a difficult decision to practice in that way because demands seem to outpace supply of personnel. But if you have a large volume of contacts but are ending homelessness for very few of them, is that really the best use of time?