Preparing New Team Members
Yesterday we had orientation for a new team member. We discussed homelessness, particularly unsheltered homelessness, to help get a better understanding of many factors that can lead to someone becoming homeless, different ways that people experience homeless, and ways that people get out of homelessness.
During orientation we look at the guiding principles for street outreach. For HOPES Center, this includes recognizing the worth and dignity of each person - a core piece of our mission. Like other outreach teams across the country, we also focus on meeting people where they are, geographically and philosophically. When engaging with someone who is living outside, key principles include being non-judgmental, following the person’s lead, confidentiality, trustworthiness, empowerment, and choice. Those are not unique to HOPES, but typical to good street outreach work.
Then we get into the specifics of what we do as a team:
Locate: To meet people where they are, you have to find them. Our team is pretty good at this and we discuss how we do that and different strategies for finding and meeting with people who are unsheltered.
Make Contact: Making contact with someone you don’t know on the streets in the middle of the night is not easy. We often only have a few moments to make sure that the person feels safe and comfortable with our approach, understands who we are and what we are doing, and doesn’t feel threatened any way. Then we hope to open the door to further conversation and engagement. During orientation, we discuss approaches, what to say, what not to say, what to do and what not to do. We also talk about mistakes we have made in the past to help people learn from our years of experience without having to repeat some of it.
Provide Services: We carry a kit of items to meet basic needs and we have some services we provide in the field. When HOPES first started, we carried a random assortment things that changed from night to night. As time went by and we gained experience, we honed the kit down to specific items that we always have available and can consistently offer day after day and month after month. We train new team members on what the items are, how we use them, and who the team works together to serve someone we meet during outreach.
Provide Information: We can help people connect to services that help them meet there needs and get out of homelessness. We talk about the services that are available in our community and how to pass that information on to people.
Linking to Housing: One of the great things about Racine is our coordinated entry system (CE) that links people who are literally homeless (living on the streets or in shelter) to housing opportunities. HOPES is an inflow agency that can put people who live on the streets onto CE’s housing prioritization list. We talk about how CE works during orientation. This is follow-up training to be able to make a referral from the field to the CE prioritization list for housing.
We cover safety, coverage strategies (how we conduct outreach across the county) and other topics. It is a lot to take in. We give the best foundation we can, but the real learning that comes on the street from the people we engage with night after night. The good news is that and continually get better at street outreach as individuals and as a team.