Staying on Script

First impressions are important. During street outreach we walk up to people we don’t know in the middle of the night and start talking to them. Knowing what to say can be a challenge. One classic example from our team was one of our volunteers (who was excellent at street outreach), who had the lead one night at 2:00 a.m. He rolled down the window of the outreach vehicle and asked someone, “Hi. Do you need anything?” The person emphatically said, “No!” and turned away. We laughed and told our colleague, “Dude, you sounded like you were a drug dealer or something!” He said that wasn’t what he wanted to say, but it’s just what came out. Indeed, that happens sometimes during outreach.

Usually, we start out from a distance with a greeting to make sure that the person knows we are coming and to try to show that we have friendly intent. Then we quickly start trying to explain who we are, what we do, and engage with the person. Sometimes there is a very short window of opportunity to accomplish this.

If I am taking the lead on a contact with someone we don’t know, I will usually start off something like this:

“Hi, how ya doing?” (While approaching)

“My name is Scott (pointing to name tag on vest) and that’s Ben (or whoever else is on my team that night) (pointing to my teammate). We are the street outreach team (pointing to patch on vest that says HOPES Outreach). We come out at night to look for people who might not have a place to stay and be sleeping outside to see if we can offer some assistance.”

At that point, someone who is not homeless will often say, “Oh no, I am just heading home from work,” or something like that. Sometimes a person will respond with something and then we follow their response. If they don’t say anything, we try to read whether they appear to be concerned about anything. Sometimes we will add something to the effect of: “We aren’t the police, or city, or (name of business near we we found them), or anything like that, so we aren’t hear to hassle you or ask you to move or anything.” Then we might offer something,

“It’s pretty hot out, would you like some water?” (Show bottle of water) or “It is pretty cold out, would you like some coffee or hot chocolate?” or “It is cold tonight, do you need a blanket?”

From there, we just follow the person’s lead and see where the conversation goes. We don’t always say the same thing and different team members approach the first contact a little differently, but it is always good to have a rough idea of what you might say when you meet someone. It helps us stay on script, even if the script has a lot of places where it says “add lib here.”