Grant Ebbesmeyer: Week 2

If it takes a village to raise a child, it’s understandable that it takes an entire city to end a huge social problem like homelessness. I had the opportunity to learn more about this collaboration during the past week at my service site, Community Alliance for the Homeless (CAFTH).

This became especially clear to me when I attended my first meeting last week for service providers in the Zero: 2016 initiative. Zero: 2016 is a nationwide effort to end veterans’ homelessness by the end of 2015 and to end chronic homelessness by the end of 2016. CAFTH is organizing the Zero: 2016 initiative in Memphis by working with service providers to utilize the housing first model. Essentially, this means that rather than making someone become clean and sober before giving them housing, we give them housing first, and then help them to accomplish other things, like sobriety (if you have the time, you should definitely watch this video of my supervisor talking about housing first at Ignite Memphis last year: https://vimeo.com/114157944).

Since I began at CAFTH, I have been entering some data about people experiencing homeless in Memphis into a spreadsheet. Most of the data comes from a vulnerability survey that people can take at several sites across the city. After taking the survey, the person receives a score. The higher the score, the more vulnerable they are, and the faster they will receive housing. At the meeting, we looked at these scores, and began assigning people to different programs and services that the providers thought would be a good fit for them. Unfortunately, because these service providers do not have unlimited space or funds, we had to stop placing people when all of the programs were full.

For nearly all of the people that we placed, at least one outreach worker at the meeting knew them very well. It was fascinating to hear them talk about these people experiencing homelessness and their stories and struggles, and I began to realize that as hard as I try, I might not ever actually understand what these people have been through. While I think it’s important to realize this, I don’t think that it makes me any less useful in my service, though. In combination with the collaboration I have seen between my organization, the city, and service providers all over Memphis, this has begun to shape how I understand service and my role this summer.

I acknowledge that I may not be able to understand what many people are going through, but I know that through collaboration and working together, I am helping to make a real difference in Memphis.