Not Everyone "Reintegrates"

Letting go of our need for happily ever afters in homelessness

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

For the first six years of my work as a professional in homelessness services, I worked mostly with older adults. In the heart of Hollywood, our doors were open to everyone, but we weren’t the only doors in town. There were at least three homelessness nonprofits that specifically offered services to young people up until the age of 25, and they were great at what they did. For adults, we were the main attraction, and more than that we were the lowest-barrier services: we worked with anyone, and because of that we ended up primarily serving the people that other place didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

When I moved to Minneapolis, I took an extremely different role in youth services. Now, I’m at an org that primarily serves 18-24 year olds. While so much is the same—the housing needs, the barriers, and the intersectionality—it feels also like entirely different work.

The young people I work have so much life ahead of them. Their resiliency and bounce-back potential make it so that homelessness may not be a defining aspect of their life. Sometimes I say it this way: If I’m doing my job right, homelessness will be a “surprising fact” about the people I work with later in their lives. Maybe one day they’ll be playin “Two truths and a lie”, and one of their truths will be that they experienced homelessness and half of the room will guess it wrong.

When I worked with adults, which tended to be older adults in their 50’s and 60’s, I understood my work to be much more like palliative care. People who experience chronic homelessness tend to have life-spans 20-30 years shorter than people who live their life indoors, and so truly I was working with people at the tail end of their lives, hoping to make that time as dignifying and peaceful and joyful as possible.

And I have to be honest… I really miss it.

Don’t get me wrong. Working with young people is really special. I’m sure if/when I move on from it there are aspects that I will miss too. But there is something uniquely special about working with people who defy a traditional expectation of what this work is, fundamentally. Let me explain.

When people think about homelessness work, I think most think of it as a sort of rehabilitation. Sometimes when I explain what I do, what gets reflected back to me is this idea that I work with people who have in some way fallen outside of a norm of society and my role is to help get them back in; like returning a fish to water, or if you want to get biblical, bringing a lost sheep back to the herd. That really hasn’t been my experience, though.

I know that some parts of homelessness work are like that. I don’t want to discredit or disparage those programs or the people that work with them. There are a good number of people who are living a pretty traditional lifestyle and who fall into homelessness and, through the help of programs targeted toward them, are put right back into that stream. We need that work, and work even further upstream that prevents people from falling out in the first place.

The work that I find myself doing most often, and to which I am most drawn, is with people who are never going to return to what we consider “normal society.” I could probably spend an extra 2500 words interrogating that phrase, because let’s be honest: what we’ve “normalized” is an extremely toxic and dishonest myth: the idea that we should all work ourselves to death for the privilege of having our basic needs met, and work even more if we want to have “nice things.” That’s insane, and actually isn’t possible for everyone the way that it’s set up. But I digress.

Under the current structure of things, the people I most love to work with are people who will never re-enter the “workforce”; who will never be able to afford housing that isn’t subsidized; who will need people to check in on them and offer physical, emotional, and other kinds of support on a regular basis for the rest of their lives. Not in a Savior-y way or a way that condescends or minimizes their full humanity, agency, or dignity, but in a way that recognizes their worthiness of acceptance and care outside of their value to the marketplace.

When it comes to homelessness and how we’ve handled it for the last century, we have to accept that many people who are coming out of it have experienced such a depth of loss, pain, and betrayal that their version of success isn’t going to be made into a Hallmark movie. Not everyone gets the “Pursuit of Happyness” ending—in fact, most people don’t. And yet they still have so much to offer. There is so much person still there for anyone willing to get to know them. The image of God dwells in them equally, maybe even especially.

To me there is nothing more sacred and holy than getting to experience and witness the lives of people who our systems and powers have deemed worthless. If you can see their worth, and they see their own, you have this experience where everything that isn’t true—lies about who is deserving and who isn’t, that our humanity is tied to our production, that we are not all connected—all falls away and between the two of you the only thing that exists is what’s real. It’s the most authentic human connection I’ve ever experienced. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to the presence of God.

If we’re going to end homelessness, for real, we have to not only accept that not everyone is going to reintegrate into society—we need to embrace it for all its beauty. We need to accept the gift that comes with recognizing that people are worthy of their basic needs and worthy of extraneous, extravagant, and joy-giving things too, even if they don’t measure up to the ridiculous standards we’re all contorting ourselves to try and fit. By learning to see their humanity, fully, we see our own more clearly too.

---

These posts will always be free.

But the rest of my work—traveling to speak and lead workshops, creating content, advocacy and direct aid—is enabled and expanded by your support. Consider becoming a Paid subscriber to enhance my reach.