Tailoring Outreach to Highly Vulnerable Subpopulations Outreach Outreach
Tailoring Outreach to Highly Vulnerable Sub-populations
Outreach • Outreach involves moving outside the walls of an agency to engage with people experiencing homelessness who may be disconnected and alienated not only from mainstream services and supports, but from the services targeting homeless persons as well. • The overall goal of street outreach should be tied to the larger goal of helping people move off the streets as quickly as possible. • Outreach is most successful when staff connect people to systems of care, and not simply of the agency they work for. This requires a higher degree of interagency collaboration, and staff training. • Outreach staff should look like and relate to the people being served – diversity including peers.
What’s Needed • Data and a Coordinated Entry Process • Access to a Continuum of Housing Choices and Services • Relationships Built by Meeting Needs Identified by the Person on the Street • Support for Outreach Workers and Line Staff • Basic Human Kindness
DATA • • • Who are we seeing? Who are we not seeing and why not? What needs to be addressed? What has or hasn’t worked in the past? Who holds the relationship? Where does the data go and what do we use it for?
Coordinated Entry as a Prioritization Tool • Using Coordinated Entry will tell you what you are lacking, and offer direction for what your community should put its energy into next. • Whatever the process is that you choose for keeping data, everyone has to use it and make sure the data going in is clean and up to date. • There must be a process for reviewing the data sets and a committee to do so that includes outreach workers. Often, the Outreach Workers can tell if the data is missing people. Data is useless if not helping to improve and expand our services according to need.
Who Are We Missing? • People are marginalized by our systems for many reasons (which may or may not be intentional): we don’t think we have adequate services for them, fear, they have been treated poorly in the past and now avoid us, they are expensive and we don’t want to serve too many of them… • In Philadelphia these folks are Trans, Opioid Users, LGBTQIA Youth, Medically Frail people who use the emergency care systems.
Access to a Continuum of Housing Choices and Services • • • Housing First Treatment Oriented Housing Shelter and Safe Havens Congregate Low Demand Housing Flexible Residential and Non-Residential Treatment, Especially MAT Choice is what works here. People are marginalized when they have no choice. Without choice, most placements made through outreach will fail.
Relationships • If someone you are reaching out to asks you for something specific, try to meet that need. • If you say your are going to do something, do it, no matter how big or small. • Always make sure you have access to what you are offering. • It is OK just to “be” with a person, if they are not interested in your services. • Ask people on the street to introduce you to people in need. They have a community and look out for each other. • Remember that Peers are welcomed in places that clinicians are not.
Support for Outreach Workers and Line Staff • Staff need to have resources and feel empowered to do their jobs. – In addition to housing/placement resources that meet the needs of these sub-populations, they need access to food, transportation, and petty cash for things like shoes and socks, soap, etc. , that may be important to the person on the street. – For people not ready to come in, staff need harm reduction resources at their disposal: needle exchange, Narcan, condoms, access to healthcare workers.
Basic Human Kindness • Our staff and our organizations need to be warm and welcoming to everyone, no matter what the circumstance or the needs of the person – comfortable furniture, coffee available, access to a computer, etc. • Do we have private toilets, showers, and laundry available for people to use? • Is staff available to work with people who may show up without appointments or in crisis?
For more Information Christine Simiriglia, CEO Pathways to Housing PA 215. 390. 1500 x 1010 www. pathwaystohousingpa. org csimiriglia@pathwaystohousingpa. org On Facebook: @Pathways. To. Housing. PA On Twitter: @Chris. Simiriglia
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