Balancing Care and Independence

Learning to ask the right questions

Last week’s post was heavy. I talked about the folks I often work with who will never “reintegrate” into “normal society.” (The heavy use of quotations belies that I have some feelings about the use of those words. Read the post if you want to know more.)

Not Everyone "Reintegrates"

I thought I would balance it out this week by talking about what it means to work with the folks who can — typically, younger people who have been dealt a series of bad hands, but who are able (with some partnership) to gain independence from systems. And I do believe that is worth celebrating and striving for. However, it is always how we do it that matters.

Because while I am a supporter of government aid and assistance (what’s the point of being the wealthiest nation in the world if it isn’t to strive for the common good?), so many of our systems of aid are designed to keep people stuck within them with no possibility of escape or improvement. The gap between those on government assistance and those independent of it is immensely large, and it continues to widen. For example, SSI and SSDI don’t even pay enough monthly to afford rent in any state in the country. But if you start working to try increase your monthly income, the government lowers your SSI or SSDI benefit. Consequently, you’re stuck at a maximum allotment that’s less than anyone can actually live on, but it also prevents you from working your way out of poverty without taking an impossible leap. Examples like this abound.

That said, I am completely disinterested in so many of the words used in conversations like this. So often I hear things like, “Well you should help them, of course, but also teach them a sense of responsibility.” Pardon me, but the young people I work with survive more in a day than most of us have in our lives. There can certainly be a learning curve for things that are new: how to pay rent, open a bank account, or cook your own food. But responsibility is a word loaded with judgment, assuming that prior to now they have been irresponsible. And I assure you, they have been responsible for more in their life than they ever should have been—that’s why they’re here. They are making the best decisions in the moment that they know how to make with the options that are presented to them, with a whole history that you may never know anything about.

image link: https://nrtimes.co.uk/pain-management-reflections-of-a-case-manager-ilscm/

Another word I reject is accountability. “How do you hold young people accountable when they make the wrong choices?” I’m not talking about when people cause harm to each other. It’s when I hear some version of this: “You can’t hold people’s hand forever, at some point they need to be accountable for their mistakes.” Exactly how much hand-holding did you need, and for how long? How long of a leash have I gotten? But somehow accountability comes into play for the 19 year old who fell behind in rent because they decided other things were more important? (Maybe they were!)

The folks that talk this way about accountability are rarely interested in other forms of accountability. For example, if we want to talk about accountability, why don’t we talk about politicians who gut social safety nets to give tax cuts to billionaires? Why don’t we talk about accountability for developers who buy affordable buildings to flip them into “luxury condos”? Where’s the accountability for the landlord who refuses to take a Section 8 voucher? Where’s the accountability for slumlords? If you’re not interested in accountability there, maybe it’s a word that doesn’t belong in your mouth.

Whew. Ok. Glad I got that out of my system.

It’s easy to talk about this, but doing it takes creativity. Here’s a story of how care and independence worked together for a meaningful outcome.

Before I tell you this, I want to emphasize that the point of the story is not that I came up with a great idea. Anything I did in this story was the result of years of great mentoring and experience from seasoned experts who invested in me and unhoused people who trusted me with their own stories and experiences. The hero of this story isn’t me or the case manager I was coaching, but the 21-year-old girl doing her best in a system that continuously failed her. For anonymity’s sake, I’ll call her Katelyn.

Katelyn was 5 months pregnant awaiting a housing voucher. She was assigned to one of the case managers I supervise, and enrolled in a program tied to a particular voucher that’s really good, but takes forever to get. She qualified for it, was assured she would get it, but she was stuck waiting for the Housing Authority to finally release it.

While she was waiting, Katelyn found the perfect apartment. The rent was less than what the voucher was going to cover. It was in a great neighborhood and had awesome amenities—the perfect fit for her and her soon-to-be-newborn. The building was one we work with often, and they were willing to overlook her lack of rental history and credit. But they needed to rent it now. Her case manager was on vacation, so she talked to me about it, and I laid out the options.

The voucher might come in a week, or it might come in a month or two. Regardless of when she moved in, we would pay her security deposit and first month’s rent to get her off to a fresh start. But, if the voucher didn’t come in, she would be on the hook for the full rent of the apartment until it did. If the voucher took a long time, and I warned her that it often did, she could rack up a balance and be really in trouble. She said she understood, and she decided to take the apartment.

It took three months for the voucher to be issued. (Accountability, anyone?)

Because being pregnant precluded her from working, she wasn’t able to pay hardly anything during those months. When the voucher finally kicked in, she had a outstanding balance of over $2500.

So her case worker and I sat together and discussed what we could do. Do we just pay it? I had been so clear with her that this could happen, and that the risk she was assuming would be hers. We had already spent all the money we normally spend, but we were allowed to spend more. (I should add that sometimes funding doesn’t work this way. We had flexibility here, but that isn’t always the case.) We certainly didn’t want to be vindictive or say “I told you so,” but we we worried about the risk of reinforcing something that wasn’t true: that no matter how bad things got, someone could always bail her out.

A lot of programs, and I mean a lot of programs, would’ve not paid. Boundaries are real, and important, and funding limits exist. There was a clear understanding of what could happen if Katelyn made that choice, and that’s what happened. If you fundamentally approach serving young people with the belief that it’s your role to teach them responsibility and accountability, then this is the perfect opportunity.

But if you were in the exact same situation as Katelyn, would you have made a different choice? It’s probably hard for most of us to even imagine having to make that choice given the amount of fallback we’ve had—that I’ve had. Katelyn knew she had an opportunity to get what she desperately needed for her and her unborn child and she seized it. That decision took courage—who in their right mind could call that irresponsible?

So how do we honor her courage, show support for the understandable situation she found herself in, while also supporting her in her journey toward independence? The solution we came to was only possible because we were asking these kinds of questions, instead of ghoulish binaries like “holding her accountable” or, so help me, “enabling.”

We sat down with Katelyn and signed a contract that said for every month that she paid her rent on time (the new reduced amount under the voucher), we would cut a check for $500 toward her outstanding rental balance. That meant that if she paid rent five months in a row, her balance would be gone and she’d have a clean slate. She agreed to the plan, and she knocked it out of the park. Five months later she was debt free and she’s been rocking it out ever since. She got the support she needed from us financially, while also developing good habits for five straight months of paying her rent in full and on time so that when our support was done, she had true independence.

When you assume the best of people, and recognize that they’re making the best decision they know how in the life that only they are living, you stop punishing “failure” and you start incentivizing success.

When we’re young, our brains are wired to seek out short-term solutions without regard for long-term consequences. The part of our brain that processes long-term consequences (what I think people mean when they say “responsibility”) is the last to develop, and cannot develop in traumatic circumstances. If you don’t know what you’re going to eat or where you’re going to sleep tonight, you will continually only use the part of your brain that seeks out short-term solutions, because your life depends on it.

For those of us who had the luxury of developing that part of our brains with immense structure, safety nets, and options, we would do well to withhold judgment and words like “responsibility” and “accountability" when it comes to people’s choices that we could never fully understand. And even within that, if you’re creative and open, there are ways you can partner with someone toward independence in ways that honor and dignify rather than shame and punish.

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