Gimme Shelter! Does The Fear Of Doing Too Much Cause Us To Do Too Little?
Gimme Shelter!
Does the fear of doing too much cause us to do too little?
by Ted Sylvester & Jeff Gearhart
The Warming Center, established in the bitter cold of February as a place for home-less people to come in out of the winter night, is about to close. It appears winter is far from over, but it isn't just the weather that concerns local advocates for the homeless. The local homeless shelter, they say, has policies mat were at least partially responsible for creating the need for the Warming Center. There is concern too, that not enough is known about the people who have frequented the Warming Center and what their future needs might be because virtually no one has bothered to ask them.
This issue is part of a much larger, critical debate going on in this community about how to deal with poor people, specifically people who end up homeless. The controversy, it seems, revolves around a practical and philosophical question confronting society at large: How much can you help someone who appears unwilling to help themselves?
One view is that the agencies who serve this population need to take a "tough love" approach, requiring certain behavior from people in order to qualify them for services. Typically these service providers deny their help if a client will not cooperate, ultimately using what they can offer as leverage for client compliance. The goal in this approach is to offer people incentives to seek the services that the system determines they ultimately need.
The other view calls this approach misguided. They argue that people who have fallen through the safety net - those who cannot for whatever reason fit into one of a multitude of programs designed for them - are the very population in need of special engagement and attention, not inflexibility and denial.
Shelters of "Last Resort"
Locally , when people first fall through the social safety net, having failed to be engaged by the primary level of emergency or outreach services - the VA Housing Trust Fund, the Red Cross, Arbor Haven, SOS, and Department of Social Services - one place they are likely to end up is on the doorstep of the Night Shelter on West Huron Street in Ann Arbor. The 70-person capacity night shelter, as well as Ashley Hace (the day shelter), is run by the Shelter Association of Washtenaw County, whose stated mission is to be the shelter of 'last resort."
Shelter life, at best, is a respite from the isolation, demoralization and danger of being on the street, and the beginnings of rebuilding one's life and community. At worst, it can be a tightly packed, and destructive combination of individuals, including women and men, substance abusers, drug dealers, elderly people, people with mental illness and with developmental disabilities. While me basic rules for residency in shelters are fairly common - no weapons, alcohol, drugs, verbal or physical violence - what happens beyond these rules is an area of great disagreement .
Historically, the Night Shelter has had a 30-day stay policy that was contingent upon cooperation with general shelter rules, lilis policy was only rarely enforced. However, after a turbulent three-year period during which the Shelter went through three directors and built a $60,000 debt, conditions within the Shelter had declined to a point where change was needed. Shelter Association board members voted last summer to adopt a firm 60-day per year residency policy. lisa O'Rear-Lassen, the newly hired Director, began enforcing the 60-day policy in Sept, 1996.
According to Shelter Association literatura, when a person obtains shelter services they are first assigned an advocate to meet with on a weekly basis. Together they work out a plan for the client including referrals to appropriate programs for substance abuse or mental illness, for example. Two weeks prior to the 60-day limit an assessment is made on the client's progress at which time either the advocate or the client may request an extension - granted in week increments - which the Shelter staff may grant or decline. According to Shelter Association documents, the policy and the extensión process exist as "an incentive for a cliënt to follow through on action plans, and, just as importantly, to encourage agencies and organizations to jusüfy (hopefully shorten) waiüng periods for cliënt services."
The policy sounds workable enough on paper but some advocates for the homeless say that it is confusing, misguided, and partially responsible for the creation of the Warming Center. Housed in the Ann Arbor Community Center on Norm Main Street in Ann Arbor, the Warming Center opened on February 7, 1996.
The Center, at this writing, operates seven days a week between 10 pm and 7 am, but is scheduled to close the last day of April. It provides a safe, warm, and clean space where people can come out of the cold. There are couches and chairs, but no beds. The rules say there will be "no laying down or stretching out," but people are allowed to sleep. There is a TV and usually some donated food. Since the Warming Center opened over 150 different people have spent time there, an average of 16 people per night.
Who's Keeping Track?
Is there a connection between the Shelter's 60-day policy and the need for the Warming Center?
To answer that question the Warming Center Committee, a subcommittee of the Interagency Shelter and Housing Council (the official monthly gathering of shelter/housing/service-providers in Washtenaw County), in April decided to survey people at the Warming Center and report on their characteristics and needs. While the survey process itself was 'unscientific," two sub-committee representatives managed to talk with a total of 19 people on April 4 and April 14. Another six persons were surveyed the following week by the Shelter Association and Washtenaw Interventions, an agency that provides services to people with mental illness.
The results of the first set of interviews suggest that there is a connection. "Most of the individuals [12-19] we spoke to reported they left the Shelter because their 60 days expired," wrote Peggy Plews of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill, in an April 17 interagency memo. "Few sounded as if they had understood the [Shelter] policy or believed there would be any point in trying to get an extension."
"I don't know if the Shelter's 60-day policy has had a direct effect on the Warming Center," Marcus Harris, Coordinator of the Warming Center, told AGENDA. "But one thing we have found out is that there have been some people who have been affected by the 60-day policy, that still have many questions about it, that haven't had their questions answered."
Harris has worked at the Warming Center four to five nights a week since it opened. AGENDA asked Harris, "How many people do you think have used the Warming Center, for whatever reason, instead of the Shelter?" Harris responded: "How many people who are maybe just passing by? Out of 150, a good 50 or 60 people."
The Shelter Association's numbers tell another story. First of all, the Shelter Association says its 60-day policy is responsible for generating only a small number of clients who were barred from their facilities, who might need to use the Warming Center. According to a March 25, 1996 Shelter Association hand-out entitled "Myths and Facts": "Out of the 404 people sheltered in the last six months, eight (or two percent) have been involuntarily exited because of a competent choice not to participate in Shelter services."
The Shelter Association also points out that "not one of these people were exited after 60 days; but after extensions of up to two months or more. The other 98% of these cliente have either been extended, housed, left voluntarily in less than 60 days, have gone into extensive treatment for substance abuse or mental illness, have gone to prison, and two are deceased."
However, a breakdown of another set of Shelter Association staüstics, during a 60-day period from November 5, 1995 to January 5, 1996, shows that out of 220 clients housed in the Shelter, 155 clients 'left on their own, without saying where they were going."
It's hard to say whether the people who left the Shelter "on their own" ended up at the Warming Center, because as Plews point out to AGENDA: "When Community Development gave the contract to the Warming Center, they made absolutely no ning for how they were going to evaluate the needs of the people using that service."
Even if the needs were known, the Warming Center was not funded to do outreach work. Outreach for this population is the responsibility of different sectors of the service-provider community, with agencies sometimes operating on shared grant money . "From what I know of the PATH, Shelter Plus Care, and WISH grants," wrote Plews, "this is the very population that should be engaged."
Yet, according to Harris, no representative from any agency had visited the Warming Center for outreach purposes before Peggy Plews and a colleague conducted their survey. As a result of the survey information, however, Community Development agreed to rund outreach in the last week of the Warming Center's operation by Shelter Association and Washtenaw Interventions staff. Two representatives from the Shelter Association did visit the Warming Center on April 26, the night AGENDA was there taking photographs for this story.
The Shelter Association, for its part, says that outreach to the Warming Center was never their responsibility, adding that they are too understaffed and underfunded as it is to operate their day and night shelter programs.
Critics of the Shelter's 60-day policy say the Shelter Association should be at least partly responsible for finding out what happens to people turned away from their facility.
"Unfortunately, despite a recent influx of federal money to address homelessness, the Shelter has received very little money for front-line engagement," Plews said "Still, if they are simply too underfunded to provide the necessary support or outreach, they need to say so. One cannot advocate for increased finds to serve people with long histories of homelessness if sünultaneously engaged in a campaign to disown them."
"Everybody's using the same language but in different ways. 'Empowerment' is not facilitated by abandonment or the withholding of services, but this appears to be the position that some agencies take. " -Peggy Plews, Alliance for the Mentally lll
Philosophy Determines Policy
"The goal of the Shelter Association," according to one of their hand-outs, "is to provide both advocacy and empowerment, which is the foundation of the 60-day policy." The "idea" of the 60-day policy and the granting of extensions is "to give clients an incentive to engage in services."
The problem with that idea, Plews wrote in the memo, is that "many folks who have experienced oppression (racism, domestic violence, poverty, homelessness, serious mental illness, etc.) don't expect to win - or have the internal resources to pursue - legal or institutional challenges, especially if they're too preoccupied with meeting basic needs." Only one of the 12 people Plews interviewed who had left the Shelter because of the 60-day policy had argued for their right to stay.
Further, Plews takes issue with the Shelter Association's idea of "empowerment." "Everybody's using the same language but in different ways," she told AGENDA. "Empowerment is not facilitated by abandonment or the withholding of services, but this appears to be the position that some agencies take."
Plews finds fault with that attitude, saying it leads to a lack of meaningful outreach to people who are unable to fulfill the system's requirements in order to get help. "The assumption that people at the Warming Center don't want services, or that they are uncooperative to services, is wrong," Plews said.
Plews questions what will ultimately happen after the Warming Center doses if the Shelter Association is unable or unwilling to accommodate all visitors at the Night Shelter. While acknowledging the complexity of the issues prompting the 60-day policy, she is concerned that some Shelter guests - particularly those with mental illness - will again fall through the cracks and disappear when their time is up, perhaps disaffiliated from Ashley Place advocates or other service providers.
"The risk to vulnerable individuals excluded from shelter and the possible need for a Warming Center next year is a public issue," Plews told AGENDA. "I would like to see the City of Ann Arbor tell the Shelter Association that as a condition of our funding we expect you not to bar people for compliance issues and to bar people only for behavior issues - being aggressive and assaultive." Plews suggests that she and a number of others in the community would then work to get the Shelter additional funding for advocacy services to more effectively serve their clientele.
As far as changing the Shelter' s operating policy, O'Rear-Lassen told AGENDA that the Shelter Association is "a private non-profit Corporation and our policies should not be appropriately dictated by outside funding sources."
"I have great respect for advocates who have been working on these issues for years," said O'Rear-Lassen, "but the Shelter' s Board and staff have expertise in these matters as well and have determined the policy for the Shelter. We want to continue to be a part of the dialogue in this community on these issues."
"Our work is premised on the belief," O' Rear-Lassen added, "that the people we work with have many kinds of skills - survival skills and personal resources - we want to work with."
Out of the fear of doing too much for someone, Plews argües, there is the chance that we can do too little. Solving the kinds of problems that drive people to seek shelter at the Warming Center or the night shelter will require extensive, in-depth outreach work, that Plews says, takes the time necessary to build a trusting relationship between client and service provider.
"Enabling isn't a bad word in every case," explained Plews. "You don't enable people to become sicker by doing outreach. By meeting them halfway you enable people the development of a relatíonship. You enable them to make the next step in their recovery."