Your Organization’s Identity Crisis
Instead of reading this blog, if you’d rather watch it as a rant on YouTube, click here.
Does your organization know what it is? Because the more I travel the more I find there are many organizations that have an identity crisis. They are…
…a substance abuse program masquerading as a homelessness program…
…an evangelical outlet to bring in more followers and increase the congregation masquerading as a homeless shelter…
…an alternate transportation provider for individuals without bus fare masquerading as a street outreach provider…
…a soup kitchen that measures its success by the number of bellies fed rather than the number of people that don’t need it anymore, masquerading as a food security program that ends homelessness…
…a family counseling program masquerading as a permanent supportive housing program…
…a youth club masquerading as a youth housing program…
…a bible study group masquerading as a housing help resource…
…a homeless shelter masquerading as permanent housing…
…a group of buildings and organizations lumped together in close geography masquerading as an integrated campus working in partnership…
…a senior’s fellowship organization masquerading as a drop-in center…
…a 211 community information line masquerading as coordinated access for the homeless service delivery system…
If you are a homeless service provider I know what you should be. You should be the champions of housing. You should be focused on ending each individual’s or family’s homelessness first and foremost. That is your job. You exist in order to not exist. It isn’t about you…it is about the people you serve. Figure that out, and you know who you are.
Geez, Don’t Let a Few Little Facts Get in the Way of Your Perceptions of People on Welfare
Like me, maybe you have a few (ahem) “friends” on Facebook that post things that make you cringe. Lately, a few posts in particular have driven me to write this blog. I was going to try and just provide insights through comments on their posts, or send them a direct message, but figured this medium may do even better.
I start by posting the memes that I have seen more than once in the last month, which tells me that if they are being shared with frequency, these are resounding with some people…
In a nutshell, what’s wrong with these pictures?
Several of the images racialize poverty. Truth is, most recipients are Caucasian.
There is a perception that those that receive welfare have large families and an increasing number of children to maximize benefits. Truth is, most welfare recipients are single persons and very small families (the average is 1.8 children per household in fact for TANF…which coincidentally is almost the same as the national average; the average size is 2.4 when you consider all welfare benefits, which is a massive decline of family size of welfare receiving families since the 1960s).
Somewhere along the way the stigma of being a substance user was attached to be on welfare. Truth is, most people with problematic substance use in our society do not receive welfare. And another inconvenient truth, it costs way, way more to test people on welfare (which is an intrusive violation, but I will park that for now) than it “saves” when users are caught. Oh, and it is private enterprises that profit from the drug testing with your tax dollars (sometimes with direct ties to the elected official that was the crusader to put the drug testing in place). Plus, in locations like Florida do you know what percentage tested positive for drug use? Two percent. That’s a fact.
Welfare receipt is implied to be a lifetime choice. Truth is most recipients (4 out of 5) receive benefits for less than 5 years – and most of those for much less than that. The single largest group that benefits from welfare is children.
Related to point 4, you have probably heard the stories of the families that have been living off welfare for generations, or the woman who has bilked the system for millions using fake identities and fictitious addresses (anyone else remember Ronald Reagan’s Chicago Welfare Queen Stories…and they were just that – stories made up of just fiction loosely associated with some facts not attributed to any one person). Truth is, fraud within the welfare system is lower than corporate fraud. For example, the rate of food stamp fraud is less than 1%. Oh, and as for the generations of welfare receipt, I just love this quote from Adrian Sinfield, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh in reviewing a recent UK report where there was an attempt to find families where no one in the family had worked for three generations: “People working and living in the area knew all about such people, of course, but not well enough, it turned out, to be able to identify any of them.”
Read across these memes, and it also seems to suggest the “free money” on welfare allow people that don’t work to enjoy a glamorous lifestyle of parties and higher end consumer products. Truth is, while benefit levels vary dramatically by region economic poverty is still a reality for welfare recipients. Let me give you an example from where I live. If you are a single person without dependents and without disability, you get $230 per month in money to meet your basic needs (food, personal products, etc.) and $376 in shelter allowance to rent a place. What would you do with $606 per month in a community where the average market rent for a Bachelor unit is $840 per month or a one-bedroom is $1,040 per month?
Many people make comments that people on welfare should not have a smart phone – or any phone for that matter (yet, having a phone is kind of important, I hope you’d agree, to have contact with potential employers). Or there is a critique of the type of phone…or phone package…or purse that the phone is in…or manicured nails that stroke the phone…or whatever. Truth is, people that experience economic poverty experience no difference in impulse control in consumer spending that anyone else in society – it simply has a bigger impact. But even with that said, you don’t know when they got the phone, as it could have been before they were receiving benefits or even a gift from a relative or a $0 down monthly package where the phone company undertook its own financial risk assessment and still decided the person was a good candidate for its product. And if the reality in your community is similar to the rate of benefits received in my community (read section 6 again) please tell me how someone uses their welfare money to buy that phone?
I’ll leave it at those 7 comments for now because they are most related to the memes. I could go on and on. The false perceptions of welfare, though, only make it harder to convince elected officials to consider increasing rates to meet the costs of today’s community; to truly ensure people have the chance to achieve vitality and security.
Assessment & Prioritization Tools: What to Look For
Is your community trying to move towards common assessment as part of coordinated access? You should be. In response to inquiries from a few avid blog readers (thanks!) here are some questions you should ask when your organization/community is choosing an assessment and prioritization tool.
1. Is it grounded in evidence?
There is no shortage of ideas on what may be a good thing to assess when a homeless person or family seeks services. Unfortunately, too many communities come up with their own list (sometimes LONG list) of things to assess without those ideas actually being grounded inevidence of what works, and the main currents of thought and practice in service delivery. That which we think and that which we know are often two totally different things. Your assessment tool should be grounded in knowledge and data, not unsubstantiated thoughts or feelings.
2. Has it been tested?
Given the assessment tool informs which type and intensity of service an individual or family may be offered, it is important to make sure the tool actually does the things that the designers of the tool thought it should do in the first place. This requires extensive testing and feedback in trial versions of the assessment tool. It also requires testing the tool against other potential tools and the use of no tool at all.
3. Has it been independently evaluated?
Researchers and developers involved with the tool do an incredible amount of leg work to get the tool off the ground. After implementation, having a credible independent evaluation completed is a good idea. An independent point of view can examine the data that comes from the tool from a fresh perspective, explore the processes involved with the tool, and also look at the outcomes that arise from using the tools.
4. If two different people are using the tool, will they get reliable results?
The only way to know this for sure is to have an independent examination of inter-rater reliability in the use of the tool. What this really gets at is whether independent bias or other related factors unduly (and even unintentionally) sways the results of the assessment.
5. Is feedback from end users of services, frontline staff and others incorporated?
Any assessment tool worth it’s salt will take the time to robustly gather feedback from a broad cross-section of individuals and families with whom the tool has been used to better understand what they think of it and how the tool could be improved. Getting the input from frontline staff that either undertake assessments using the tool and/or use the data from the tool to inform support services should also be given an opportunity to provide feedback and input into the tool improvements.
6. Does it help inform decision-making?
Assessment tools don’t make decisions – they inform decisions. It is a mistake to anthropomorphize a tool and think that it has a brain or speaks. It doesn’t. The information gleaned from the assessment feeds into a prioritization process. If there isn’t a defined process for how to use the information from the assessment to inform prioritization, then the assessment information is misaligned with how it needs to be used.
7. Is there any utility to the tool after the initial assessment?
Having a score or conclusion on depth of need or type of support from an assessment begs the question – so what? The assessment information should help guide service delivery for particular populations with specific types of needs. It is even possible to use the same tool that was implemented at initial assessment at predetermined intervals to actually see if acuity of the individual or family is going down over time.
8. Will it improve housing outcomes over the longer-term?
Longitudinal information helps inform whether the support programs that the individual or family gets connected to as a result of the assessment actually improves housing stability. If the assessment tool highlights the areas that benefit from the most intensive types of supports so that housing does not become destabilized, then the tool is also important for promoting and even supporting longer term housing stability.
OrgCode Consulting developed the Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool (SPDAT) that meets all of the requirements of what is asked above. You can learn more about the SPDAT here and here. You may also be interested in the integrated Vulnerability Index (VI) and SPDAT Prescreen “Supertool” which you can learn more about here.
Gone Fishing – And That’s a Good Thing
As you read this I have literally gone fishing. I am in the middle of nowhere in Northern Ontario less than two hours from where I grew up. In fact I am on a small island in the middle of a lake that is only accessible by boat. There is no cell coverage where I am. My phone is off. My computer has to wait until Friday. All I am concentrating on until Friday is making sure my eldest son is having a good time, and his uncle, grandfather and cousin aren’t spinning him tales around the campfire that will keep him up for days.
I wasn’t always this way. The thought of taking time off work used to create huge anxiety for me. When I used to lead a rather large street outreach and housing program I feared that there would be a huge client crisis or a big issue with one of my staff while I was away, or that the Mayor would need me and I would be unavailable and let him down.
Not only would I fear taking vacation, I would keep my phone on all day, every day of the week. No matter what time someone tried to get a hold of me, I was on it. Every vibration of an email elicited the same response of grabbing to scan whom it was from and whether it demanded my attention. In my Blackberry days, I would even feel phantom vibrations on my hip when it wasn’t attached to me.
I also used to work until about 11 or midnight every day and then get up early enough to get to the office for 6am so that I could have a couple hours of quiet time before the noise and demands of the day consumed me. And I worked at least Saturday or Sunday pretty much every week. When I was traveling to help other communities understand what we were doing, I would spend all evening into the wee hours staying current on everything that I couldn’t do because I wasn’t in the office that day.
Why on earth did I do all that?
I was afraid that others measured the value of my contributions by how hard I worked. I was afraid that if I didn’t work that hard I wouldn’t be a credible leader when I asked my staff to do half as much. I was afraid that people would only think I was smart if I churned out a huge volume of high quality work in a short period of time. I was afraid of failure. I was afraid that if I took my foot off the pedal that we would lose momentum in the massive change initiative that we were working through to alter homeless services. I was afraid that my boss would find a replacement for me. I was afraid of not using my talents to their fullest potential. I was afraid of being lonely – even when I felt alone while surrounded by other people. I was afraid that if I took time out for me I would be scared to confront who I had become and all of my shortcomings…my remarkable imperfections.
You may say it all sounds insecure. And it is. You may think it all sounds unhealthy and unreasonable. And it is. You may believe this is exactly the wrong type of behavior to exhibit to a staff time. And it is.
You may be that person or have been that person. Or maybe you have worked with someone that demonstrated similar behavior.
I didn’t know it or appreciate it at the time, but there is a link between these tendencies and depression in some people. I am one of the “some people”. I thought all of this behavior would make me feel whole. It didn’t. I still have the scars of these efforts that damn near killed me – or to be more honest, made me want to kill myself sometimes or at least muse about what the world would be like without me in it. (If you are a new reader and don’t know about my depression you can read this or watch this video I made after the Sandy Hook shootings last year.) No amount of being busy ever actually compensated for the emptiness I felt inside most days.
I am still learning how to relax and truly practice self-care. Make no mistake, I am a work in progress on that front. But over the last three years as I have started to make a conscious effort to practice wellness, I have come to realize that one of the best things I can do every summer is to make sure there is a week that I am gone fishing and completely unwired from the inter-web. It is part of my Wellness Plan, which I have integrated into my life to help me ensure that I am aware of what I need to do to increase the likelihood of remaining well.
Maybe I will hear the loon’s calling each other repeatedly. Maybe I will see a moose or bear or other great Canadian creature. Maybe I’ll catch a bass or 12. Maybe I’ll hear my dad’s fishing stories again. Maybe my brother and I will relive another one of our adventures from our childhood. All that stuff doesn’t matter as much as taking the time to not focus on work and just focus on decompressing…taking time to be well and appreciate wellness.
The outcome of practicing self-care is that I tend to be more relaxed, which in turn makes me more focused. When I am more focused, I am more productive and more attentive to the needs of all the people I support and work with in the pursuit of ending homelessness, increasing affordable housing, and putting social policy into practice. I will never be all things to all people; but with the right break, I can be a better person to many people, starting with myself.
Values I Can Get Behind
Since late in 2012 I have been doing some work with Crossroads Rhode Island. They are a large multi-service organization in Providence offering a wide range of services to meet a plethora of needs within one organization. From showers for people living rough through to housing, they have it covered.
However, I am writing this blog not to outline Crossroads’ services, or to talk about the work I have had the privilege of doing with the organization. (Though I do like the organization quite a bit and could easily brag about them.) Nope – what I want to talk about are the three values that they use to drive their organization. There is something radically awesome about the power and simplicity of the three values they have:
Safety – promoting an environment free from physical and emotional harm and ensuring a feeling of security and comfort to all.
Respect – acknowledging the intrinsic worth of every person.
Effectiveness – delivering services and managing the organization with efficiency, professionalism, innovation, and accountability.
(To be clear, the organization developed these values completely independent of OrgCode.)
I am especially enamored with Effectiveness as a value for an organization. To me, if an organization values Effectiveness it means they believe in doing things that are proven to work rather than relying on what “feels right”. When the value of Effectiveness is put into practice, it means that trying hard or meaning well is insufficient.
As an employer, when Effectiveness is a value I think it says to the staff team that there is a willingness to help ensure they are successful at their jobs. If this means exposure to new ideas or more training, then this has to happen. You can’t say you want to be effective and then figure everyone will figure out on her/his own how to be effective. I love how professionalism is explicitly stated as part of Effectiveness.
I appreciate that Effectiveness, as it is valued within Crossroads Rhode Island, encompasses both service delivery and management. I can think of too many examples where this type of value was out of whack between service staff on the frontlines and those a step removed from service users. What this says to me is that Effectiveness is the responsibility of the entire organization.
The last thing that I love about Effectiveness as a value is that putting this into practice increases accountability. I don’t see how one can claim to be effective without there being measures of efforts in delivering services, and preferably a measurement against a standard or expectation. Measures open up the opportunity for accountability. And for which people does this accountability matter? End users of services are the most important in my books. But peers on the staff team, the organization as a whole, peer organizations in your community, and funders also come to mind.
Does your organization or community take Effectiveness serious enough to make it one of your core values? Worth considering, ain’t it?
2013 National Alliance to End Homelessness Conference: The Top 3 Things I Took Away from This Summer’s Conference
Every summer, for almost a decade now, the Conference on Ending Homelessness put together by the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, DC has been a highlight for me. It has become a tradition. It reinvigorates me. It teaches me. It reminds me why we do this work – day in and day out.
There is no way to fully capture in this blog everything that was discussed at the conference. If you search the hash tag #naeh13 you can see the thread of some of the most dominant themes by some rather prolific tweeters.
In this blog, I wanted to reflect on the top three things that I took away from the conference this year – which may also be of interest to those unable to attend:
1. Success is possible.
It is inspiring to see the success of communities like New Orleans on track to end chronic homelessness. It is invigorating to see the results of the 100K Homes campaign, especially the 43 communities in the 2.5% club. It is refreshing to hear how communities like Grand Rapids and Cleveland made the necessary, but difficult, decisions to properly coordinate access into their homeless service delivery system. It is awesome to hear how organizations like UMOM in Phoenix transformed their resources to focus on serving people with higher acuity and many barriers to housing stability.
And I could go on. For anyone who feels that the job of working to end homelessness is an impossible task, take the time to look at those that are seeing success. But I should point out that each of these communities had to make tough choices to not provide business as usual. Success came from doing things differently – not doing the same things but expecting different results.
2. There is still confusion of some key concepts and terms
It is unfortunate – but an opportunity for improvement – to help people get greater clarity on several key concepts and terms: Housing First; Rapid Re-Housing; Prevention; Diversion; Acuity; Assessment; Collaboration; Case Management; Permanent Supportive Housing. For each of these, I encountered it used incorrectly on more than one occasion. If we are going to move forward collectively in the pursuit of ending homelessness, I think it will be important to all get on the same page when it comes to the concepts and terms used quite frequently. If we aren’t all on the same page, chances are we will think we are talking about the same things when we are not, or drawing upon a body of evidence and data in an incomplete or incorrect manner.
While I have addressed many of these in blogs and videos on our website, I think a consolidated glossary would probably be helpful too. I should really get on that.
3. Good data results in good decisions
The conference reinforced the importance of data many, many times. Data will only continue to become more important for decision-making as funding remains stagnant or decreases. And it is becoming more and more important for philanthropic investments.
It was encouraging to see communities like Tulsa use data so effectively for increasing the housing stock while also demonstrating social return on investment. It was excellent to see the likes of San Francisco demonstrate, through data, the relationship between the child welfare system and homelessness – and when the support intervention may work best. It was helpful to see how USICH and HUD both shared data to demonstrate where there has been effectiveness, and where improvements still need to be made.
It is a real delight to attend the Alliance conferences and learn. The next conference focuses on homeless youth and families and is being held in New Orleans in February. Stay tuned to endhomelessness.org to get more information – it is time and scarce money well invested!