Outreach Principle: Worth and Dignity
Recognizing the worth and dignity of each person, HOPES Center serves the mental health and social service needs of people experiencing poverty and homelessness. Recognizing the worth and dignity of each person is not only a key part of HOPES Center’s mission. How we treat people is important to HOPES in everything we do, but it is especially relevant to and a core principle of our street outreach work.
As we say in one of our videos about HOPES, homeless is a situation, not a person. We serve people who are in an unsheltered homeless situation. That means that their ordinary sleeping accommodation is a place not meant for human habitation. As an outreach team, we don’t focus on the person’s situation except to the extent of what we can do to help them while they are in it and help them as they try to leave it. Above all, we recognize that the people we serve are people just like us. They may be in a more challenging situation at the moment, but people are defined by so much more than their situations.
We recognize that we meet people who live in tents who may know how to play an instrument, know a lot about animals and birds, or have spent a lot of time studying the constitution. We meet people living in cars who have long histories of work, who have served our country, who have very high IQs, who are always concerned about other people in need, or are looking forward to being housed again so that they can have their family stay with them. We meet people who can identify the constellations above us and people who have great senses of humor. One of the blessings of street outreach is that when we go out, we consistently encounter strength, resilience, kindness, worth and dignity in the people we meet. We frequently have people express concern for the team, wishing us well and telling us “be safe out there,” as we part for the night. Mutual respect and recognition of our humanness is the basis of a relationship that can become a path out of their homeless situation. It is fundamental to who we are and what we do at HOPES.
