Category: Projects Spring 2017

Expert Interview with CFH Director of Community Outreach

Posted on by Wendy

Profile

Name: Peter Lombardo

Title: Director of Community Outreach at the Center for the Homeless

Years of experience: Worked with CFH for 10 years

Themes

1. South Bend has a relatively large number of resources available to the homeless population; however, some choose not to use them

Peter described a variety of services commonly used by all homeless, including soup kitchens, places to shower, shelter options, etc. Interestingly, South Bend has become renowned for the programs here, and people will travel from other parts of the state or even the country to have access to these programs. It seems the core issue is not a lack of services, but rather that some homeless choose not to utilize them.

2. Barriers exist that prevent homeless people from using some services

For example, CFH has a strict drug-free policy, which can seem an impossible expectation for addicts. In addition, the program is known for being very long (2 years) and intensive. Homeless who feel their situation is only temporary or who do not wish to comply with the rules may choose not to use CFH as a shelter. Another barrier may be mental health and/or social anxiety. Peter believes some homeless do not want to be surrounded by other people while they use the shelter and its programs, and this may prevent people from using CFH resources.

3. The main encampment population has been displaced, and many now have nowhere to stay

The city experienced a public problem with the large encampment under the bridge last summer. Now that those homeless have been displaced, many have no where to go. The only housing option for them right now is the weather amnesty program, either through CFH or connected to Hope Ministries.

4. The city is shifting toward harm reduction/Housing First model, but it’s not here yet

Oaklawn Center has already implemented a harm-reduction housing program with very limited capacity. The city of South Bend will be building and finishing apartments intended for the Housing First approach in a little over a year. While this provides hope for the future, there is still a large lag where these people are not being housed.

Memorable Quotes

“People may be leery about any sort of structure, possibly because of mental health. For example, with severe depression, don’t want to go where anyone else is.”

 

Analogous Immersion

Posted on by Matthew

Analogous Immersion: Homeless System Simulation  

Date: March 2nd, 2017

Participants: Amanda Berusch, Sarah Reihl, Matthew McCormick, Paul Cepak, Yuwei Tu, and Parker Mathes

Simulation Summary:

The Homeless System Simulation is an activity that is meant to help participants understand how the homeless assistance system works. Moreover, this simulation aims to show participants the struggles and complexities of working most effectively to help a homeless population with limited resources. This simulation incorporates actual data extracted from homeless systems all around the country. We chose this option for our analogous immersion because we have information from the user (homeless population), however we felt that gaining insight from the perspective of the “system” would be beneficial, as well.

The Way it Works:

Each player is assigned a certain position within the homeless assistance system. These positions are represented in the form of cards, which include Intake, Emergency Shelter, Rapid Re-Housing, Outreach, Transitional Housing, and Permanent Housing. The homeless population is represented by a number of beads on each card. Through different rules and strategies implemented in the simulation, each player’s goal is to have the least amount of beads on their card by moving their population to permanent housing. Player actions can include adding a program, opening a diversion column, or converting a program. Total beads on each player’s card are tallied up at the end of each round.

Key Insights:

Solving the problem of chronic homelessness is not easy, especially from the side of the “assistance system”. There are such limited resources to the point that moving people to permanent housing becomes a strong challenge. This game has showed us that not only are resources scarce, but also that there are variables that can change the way you allocate them at any time. This ambiguity increases the challenge of moving people to permanent housing even more. We must have a resolution in times of uncertainty in our solution/proposal.

 

 

Gallery Day Comments

Posted on by Madison

Gallery Day Feedback

Initial Thoughts:

Mansour Eid and the teacher who joined him were immensely helpful in their feedback and comments. It was such a pleasure to actually talk to them about our subject; I found that our take-away’s and theirs seemed to align a lot. I do wish that they had given more feedback via the sticky notes, or emailed us their thoughts after gallery day.

It did feel really incredible to have compiled all of that information, and I think our team is excited to move forward and come to more definite conclusions.

The most difficult part of the whole project seems to be where to go from here. Our team has a lot of interesting data, but it is unclear in which direction is the best for us to go to accomplish the intended goals.

What we learned//need to learn in the future:

  • Walking through our journey map, we realized which sections of the journey map were more important to our project (Entice and Engage).
  • We also talked a lot about the necessary target markets to address in our final solution. Parents? Students? What age for the students? What age for the parents? What demographics of parents and students should we look at?
  • I feel like M. Eid could have given us more feedback on what he was looking for or what he wanted, so finding out what it is that he really wants.
  • Furthering our research on what the proper demographics to reach out to might be.
  • Ranking and assessing what factors are most important in the school choice for parents, students, etc.
  • Update our design brief.
  • Build out our archetype map — this is complex for us as we want to focus both on parents and students.
    • This might mean creation of more than one archetype map.
  • Figuring out WHO our main focus and user should be.
  • Assessing all of the BLUE sticky notes that I added

Patterns that Began to Emerge:

  • Socioeconomic differences
    • Low income parents care about different things than
  • Age differences
    • Time when
  • Preference for the magnet
  • Lack of academic advertising
  • Desire for a more attractive learning environment (school aesthetics)
  • Misconceptions about Clay’s strengths and weaknesses
  • Preference for Adams due to academic strength and college placement

 

 

Mark Harrell-Ethnography Summary For the Boys and Girls Club of South Bend

Posted on by Mark

Expert Interview: Rachael

I really enjoyed my interview with Rachael as she provided good insight to many of the issues with the teen program. Perhaps the biggest insight I gained was the issues with transportation and getting teenage users to the club itself. Beyond some of the middle schools in the area, there is no available transportation to the club from the high schools and as a result the attendance has dropped. The teen club is comprised of approximately 20-25 members.

Expert Interviews: Camille

My interview with Camille was very insightful given her experience and amount of time spent at the club (She’s been a part of the club since 1998). She too addressed the issue of transportation and provided stories of the dangers of some of the kids walking to the club from home or school. She also sighted that when the transportation was available from the high schools, the attendance was over 100 members for the teen program alone. Camille also went into some of the details regarding the Friday night pizza and “teen night” at the club that could potentially be a valuable tool when trying to attract teens in the future.

 

User Interviews:

Speaking with a wide variety of users during my time at the club gave me a better insight into how the users got to the club, and how difficult it truly was for some of the users to get to the club. Many also felt that they would have more of their peers attend if transportation was available from their high schools. Many also felt that if teen night on Fridays was brought back that their friends would be more interested in attending.

 

Immersion:

Spending time at the club allowed me to observe how the users interacted and what their day was like at the club. What I mostly saw was kids being active in the impressive gym facility that the club has. I personally believe that this gym can be utilized and an attractive asset to attract more users.

 

Workarounds

Posted on by Matthew
  1. We do not have a refrigerator on our third floor of our house, so we use a pot with ice in it to keep things cold.
  2. We use our Christmas tree “wrap around” lights because we don’t have lights in our hangout room.
  3. On our boat in Cancun, people used a line hook as a cup holder.

Workarounds

Posted on by Nicholas

Las Vegas is not the most picture friendly place, so I took some pictures off the internet to show some workarounds I noticed.

 

Each table uses chips instead of money, which allows the dealers to store and distribute the money in an easier way. Also, the chip design separates the user from the real value it represents.

 

Convenient signs outside of the hotel guide the uber drivers and users away from the crowded front entrances of the resorts. The rise in popularity of uber and lyft made this a necessary workaround.

 

Lastly, people in the sports book room would use any item, such as Sbarro’s pizza boxes or a hat, to indicate that they were still using a specific seat. This workaround came about since there was high demand for seating in the room due to March Madness.

Workarounds

Posted on by Faisal

 

Seattle Convention Center:

Bathroom stalls have cutouts in order to prevent people from shooting up in the bathrooms.

Everywhere around Seattle from public places outside to bathrooms in grocery stores I noticed these needle drop-boxes. From my knowledge on public health, the idea seems to be that the government is accepting that no matter what rules and regulations are in place, people might abuse drugs. Given that, the government is trying to minimize the spread of disease because of needle sharing.

 

In Portland, they were trying to reduce fossil fuel emissions. In order to do so, they aimed to reduce the number of people using automobiles for transportation. The workaround here was to paint some of the road green for a designated bike lane. According to my friend, this significantly reduced the number of car commuters.

Break Blog Post

Posted on by Wendy
I saw this sign and thought about how would this sign help anyone of falling ice. Is it supposed to tell them to call for a fair catch or look up and get their eye pierced. Maybe they could come up with a better system to beware people of falling ice.
The door has been in front of the urinal and I can say that I have never seen someone use that urinal because the door is in front of it. There needs to be a better way to have a door and a urinal in such proximity. Possibly even get rid of the door, because no one uses it.