A lesson in empathy

I was blown away by the youth homelessness training program, The Ropes: Understanding and Engaging in Youth Homelessness. I expected a rigidly structured program that presented “scenario A” and then handed us “solution A.” Before even going, I resented what I assumed would be a simplified instruction manual on how to handle anything but simple situations. Reflecting on my own expectations, I feared an “us versus them” dichotomy would permeate the discussion.

Tristan Herman and Joseph Seia, the program leaders at New Horizons, knew better. They geared the three-hour conversation so that the fundamental question was not how can we handle youth homelessness, but how do we handle ourselves in the face of experiences we don’t understand. We could have spent the three hours combing through hyper-specific procedures for handling potential circumstances. Instead, Joe and Tristan compiled a list of effective strategies and spent the majority of the program developing one overarching tool – empathy.

Tristan Herman

Joseph Seia

We began the meeting with the important task of surfacing all societal and personal stereotypes. We shouted out the obvious misattributions of criminality and laziness that society unfairly imposes on homeless populations. Even though I recognize their fallacy on an intellectual level, I could feel my own prejudice gnaw at me as I voiced the stereotypes out loud. We deconstructed them. We found the kernel of truth in each stereotype and put it in the context of a system stained by internalized racism, self-fulfilling prophecies, and little upward mobility. I looked my own prejudice square in the face and saw how it distracted, how it dehumanized.

I come from a wealthy suburban town. I grew up in relatively stable family and living conditions. I’ve been afforded every opportunity in the world, and as consequence, I exude privilege. I don’t try to but it’s immediately obvious because it’s my reality – I’m lucky. So I carry a certain level of guilt in even trying to relate to individuals often defined by their misfortune. Tristan and Joe offered enormous insight in how they framed this dissonance.

First of all, youth experiencing homelessness develop a plethora of skills and character traits that demand my admiration:

• Resourcefulness
• Resilience
• Adaptability
• An unmatched will to survive

I’m envious of how kids my age possess such self-reliance. That’s worth recognizing.

Furthermore, these youth exist in a vastly different culture than I do, however their decision-making rationale is quite similar. They have to keep warm in difficult weather conditions, stay awake in case of danger, and endure the monotony of the day. They develop coping mechanisms. I would too. They must quickly acclimate themselves with street power dynamics, sometimes choosing between survival and morality. I would make the same choice every time. They develop a routine and sense of normalcy that makes uprooting their life on the streets undesirable. I seek a similar comfort in my own normalcy. The skills they develop to survive on the streets translate poorly to a work environment, just as my writing skills would do nothing for me on the streets.

I left the training sessions feeling a little less removed from the struggles these youth face. I didn’t have any more understanding of their experiences, but a greater appreciation for their choices – their human choices. I could see why they were stuck. I would be stuck too.

Rental Inspections coming to Seattle

Solid Ground tenant counselor Trish Abbate was featured in a recent KING5 story on Seattle’s new rental inspection policies. The polices are an important new consumer protection in Seattle’s overheated rental market. You can view the piece on the KING5 website.

 

Family Homelessness 2.0

Editor’s note: This is reposted with permission from Impatient Optimists, the blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the authors.

By  Dan Brettler, Gordon McHenry Jr., David Wertheimer

Those of us who have been engaged in efforts to end family homelessness over the past decade need to acknowledge one of two things: Either the work is extremely complex and difficult, or we’re not very good at our jobs. While both of these statements could be true, given the time, talent, and passion that so many have been focusing on this issue for so long, we conclude (and hope) that the first statement is more accurate.There are many different crises that can catapult a family into homelessness: Loss of a job, domestic violence, accidents or serious illness, and inter-generational poverty – to name just a few. In addition, despite efforts to coordinate, past experiences in responding to homelessness have shown us that, although admirable, fragmented, non-integrated efforts to solve this problem by organizations and systems working independently and on their own have not stemmed the tide of this crisis.

The good news is that we now know what works: Coordinated Entry is an emerging practice that, when it is working effectively, helps to target equitably the right type and intensity of intervention to each family. Decades of practice (and tradition) have resulted in high levels of fragmentation across the many service systems families may touch in their efforts to seek stability. Coordinated entry offers a systemic intervention predicated on a very simple belief: Families in crisis should not have to “work the system” to find the supports that they need. Rather, the system should work for them.

In addition, rapidly returning families to permanent housing and connecting them to the specific supports and services they need to promote stability are proving in communities across the nation to be among the most efficient and effective ways to end family homelessness. Simply stated; families experiencing homelessness need housing first. This can be an uphill climb; in the current environment in the Puget Sound region affordable housing is a precious and scarce commodity. Providers working to quickly identify permanent housing for homeless families face daily challenges with rents increasing at record rates, inequities in access to housing, and extremely high competition for existing housing units.

Coordinated entry and promoting access to permanent housing and the right mix of services tailored to each family’s needs are critical first steps in moving toward solutions to family homelessness. Creating a systemic response that effectively responds to the complex, individual needs of each homeless family requires levels of collaboration and integration that have, historically, been unfamiliar and sometimes considered suspect by even the most dedicated system leaders and providers of care.

In this challenging context, introducing new, collaborative responses have proven difficult to organize and even harder to implement. Nevertheless, data from communities across the nation tells us we can be highly successful when our efforts are focused first and foremost on rapidly returning families to housing.

We haven’t always gotten these collective solutions right the first time around, despite the very best of intentions. Here in King County, for example, the first version of a coordinated entry system for homeless families – called Family Housing Connections – proved to be cumbersome and complex, and resulted in long waits for help that appeared on the surface to be worse than the chaotic absence of a collective response that had existed previously.

It’s a tribute to organizational leadership and line staff providers that we all didn’t throw up our hands in frustration and decide simply to return to the absence of a system we had before we started. Instead, leaders and providers worked together to carefully examine what was going wrong with the efforts – why families were waiting too long for assistance and housing – and revised the approach to address the specific problems that had been identified.

As a result, an overhaul of the King County family homelessness coordinated entry system is now underway, and as both NPR and the homeless newspaper Real Change have noted, we’re beginning to see improvements in both the length of time families wait for help and the speed with which they are being re-housed. With continued collaboration to implement more significant changes, even more dramatic improvements are imminent.

Mark Twain said that “Nobody likes change except a wet baby.” There’s a real truth there. Change is hard, especially when the changes being made are attempting to undo a crisis like family homelessness that has been decades in the making and is rooted in a constellation of economic, political, and social issues.

Looking at a problem from a systems perspective and making changes that promote collaborative solutions that were not in place before, can provide clear pathways to improved responses to the needs of those families experiencing the most extreme crises. It’s not easy. It’s not simple. It requires patience, and the willingness to look at what’s going badly in order to determine what needs to be done to do better.

That’s exactly what is happening right now in King County and in communities across the nation. All of us learn the hard way on a daily basis that new responses to extreme challenges like homelessness rarely get the solution right the first time around. Rather than abandoning all hope and returning to even more dysfunction, coming up with Version 2.0 of a solution can offer the promise of moving in the direction where we’re finally getting it right.