Slow Down and Don’t Assume
HOPES Center provides orientation to new street outreach staff and volunteers when they come on board. The real learning comes in the field though. Orientation materials make a lot more sense after you have done it for a while and have some practical experience During orientation, we talk about two common “mistakes” in approach during street outreach, one by new team members and one by experienced team members.
Slow Down: One year we had people who were unsheltered gently tell us that some of our new team members were a little “pushy.” They were so eager to serve and do outreach that they barraged people with all of the things that they wanted to offer in rapid succession and asked people a lot of questions, sometimes personal questions, before having established any kind of real rapport. The advice we give, even before people go out for the first time, is to slow down, listen more than you talk, and follow the (unsheltered) person’s lead. Giving someone a cup of coffee is easy. Building a relationship that will help someone as they work towards ending their homelessness is not as easy and usually doesn’t happen with the first meeting.
Don’t Assume: As an experienced street outreach leader, I (Scott) have often made the mistake of either assuming that a specific spot will not be occupied, or that it will be occupied by the person who has usually been there. This had led to me skip going to a location where someone might have been (because I believed it would be vacant), being surprised to find someone and caught off guard, or approaching a location expecting to make a familiar contact but then running into someone I have never met before. We made our only contact to date with an unaccompanied minor (16 years old) in a spot where we didn’t expect anyone to be that night. We checked for due diligence purposes only to find someone who needed help. My advice to myself and other experienced outreach team members is to always assume that you are going to run into someone you don’t know. It makes an unexpected contact a lot easier for everyone.
