Category: The City of South Bend

In his earlier blog post, Matt’s description of the difficulty we experienced moving people into “permanent housing” was spot on. The limited resources that the simulation provides creates a major roadblock that we believe is similarly experienced by homeless support systems throughout the country.

The one portion of the simulation that was not taken into account was the challenge of working with homeless people individually and looking at their individual needs. From the research we have collected, every homeless individual has different needs, thus intensifying the challenge of moving the entire homeless population into permanent, let alone temporary, housing.

No simulation can be perfect, but we thought it was important to note the other factors that contribute to the difficulty in delivering permanent housing.

To piggyback on Sarah’s prior blog post on the card sort, I wanted to note a key takeaway for the responses we received ranking the importance of “resources.” Oak Lawn, which is a local institution in Elkhart that provides mental health and addiction treatment services, was ranked last on the list. We found this interesting because of the large percentage of the South Bend homeless population that struggles with mental health and addiction issues. Our focus group noted the importance of immediate resources, like Social Services and Soup Kitchens, but they did not value the longer-term solutions as highly. Obviously immediate resources are necessary for day-to-day survival, but it was interesting to see a significantly decreased emphasis on the importance of the long-term horizon. Their list of responses definitely begs the question, “Is this homeless group not seeking attention for mental health and addiction issues? Or is it too difficult to both seek attention and get by day-to-day?”

Parker’s Workarounds:

#1: Although challenging to see because the picture is tiled to the left, the cardboard box is taped over the window above our door to block out the early morning light.

#2: My dog recently injured her leg, and to keep her from reinjuring herself, we attempted to build an enclosure in my backyard. When we ran out of fence, instead of purchasing more, we decided to use 2 lawn chairs to finish the area.

#3: While perusing through my dorm, I noticed another student propped his door open with his shoe because he was tired of it slamming closed. Pretty smart because the slamming can be quite disturbing.

Date: Tuesday, March 7th, 2017

Summary:

On my visit to the Mishawaka Food Pantry, I first talked to the director, Mike Hayes. After a long conversation, he introduced me to a man by the name of Pat (I did not ask for a last name). Pat works in the back “warehouse” area of the food pantry and assists with the day to day operations of food intake. He was around 60 years old and suffered from type 2 diabetes. He used to be married without children, until alcoholism took over his life and his wife divorced him. Now he travels from couch to couch as he can not stay healthy or clean enough to hold a job. Mike even mentioned that Pat will pass out from time to time in the back and they have to take him to the hospital via ambulance. Interestingly, Pat has no desire to find a job and reconnect with society. He said that he enjoyed being “off the grid” and did not enjoy the societal pressures that he used to feel. This was an interesting perspective that I had not yet heard from our other interviews.

Presenting our research to our partners from the City of South Bend was a very rewarding experience for the team. I feel that we did a very good job of presenting our research in a colorful and organized manner, and the feedback that we received was also helpful. Out of the various comments that Cherri made, I felt that the most important was their recommendation to narrow down the scope of what we define as “homelessness.” This was similar to the advice of Mike Hayes from the Mishawaka Food Pantry, because people have their own definitions of the word and might not define themselves as such, when they really are homeless. Cherri also mentioned that it is important to consider all demographics of homeless people and to inquire if they have an ID or not. These are factors that will give us more widespread data and hopefully lead us to a propose a more suitable solution.

When we were at the Downtown Soup Kitchen, we did a card sort for our interactive ethnography. We asked two questions, (1) What do you think a homeless person would spend their income on first?, and (2) What resources do you think a homeless person would take advantage of first? Above is a picture of the most frequent answers; for income: Food, housing, bills, medication, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, clothing; for resources: Social services, Center For the Homeless (used for continuing education)/Churches (used for soup kitchens), Hospitals, and Oak Lawn.

Key Takeaways:

1. It is important to ask the questions in a way that attempts to avoid biased answers. Rather than asking what they themselves would use income on, we tried to ask it in a way that avoided some preconceptions.
2. Even so, people were hesitant to say that income was spent on alcohol/drugs. Therefore, there is either a misconception that this population is using income to buy these things or our card sort does have some inherent biases.
3. As far as resources, the homeless population does largely depend on Social Security payments. Therefore, it is essential that they have addresses to send these payments to and/or a form of identification.

Location: Mishawaka Food Pantry 

Date: Tuesday, March 7th, 2017

Participants: Matthew McCormick 

Interviewee: Michael Hayes, Director 

Summary:

To gain further insight on what other cities might be doing to help the problem of chronic homelessness, I traveled to the Mishawaka Food Pantry. Upon my arrival, I was introduced to Mike Hayes, Director of the food pantry. Mike and I spent about 45 minutes discussing the scope of the project that we are working on for the city of South Bend and information that he could provide to aid us moving forward.

Mike has spent several years on the Mishawaka City Council in addition to his time at the food pantry, and has a strong relationship with the government on tackling this issue. I explained that at this point in the project, we are still in discovery mode, but will soon be narrowing our scope. He then gave two main points that I feel are very important to our project at this time.

1. Most people that he sees regularly all have separate, individual problems. There is not just one solution that can solve homelessness. For this reason, we have to segment our solution and focus on one area. For example, focus on homeless people receiving adequate medical attention, or assist in finding job opportunities for homeless people with a criminal record.
2. It is important to define what homelessness is, and figure out how South Bend defines it. His experience in Mishawaka is that if you ask the city how many homeless people there are, they will probably say none because when they find one, they immediately take them to a shelter and do not count them. Most recently, he saw a number that said 11 homeless people in Mishawaka. However, he feels that there are many more who go “couch to couch” and do not consider themselves homeless but really indeed are. This is something that we should take into consideration when looking at South Bend specifically.

My time with Mike was very beneficial. He was open to helping out the team moving forward if we have any more questions and even said he has experience writing grants if we ever come to that point in our solution. He was a wealth of knowledge and I am very thankful that he took the time to speak with me.

Analogous Immersion: Homeless System Simulation  

Date: March 2^nd, 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.