I remember doing puzzles with my mom growing up. The dining room table generally had a puzzle in progress during the week but, had to be finished by the weekend for family gatherings and having company over for dinners.
When there was a missing piece, it prevented us from finishing it and it was put back in the box, still a missing piece. I’ve been discovering that the end of homelessness has a missing piece: education. Not educating the public, but educating those going into housing. For decades, people experiencing homelessness sometimes finally get into housing, but are just dropped off and that’s the end. We expect homeless people to figure things out for themselves when essentially we’ve been left out of the world for so long playing catch up is near impossible without help. Someone once said to me, “Give them a pole, but teach them how to fish.”
We’re starting to increase what we have in the bucket of affordable housing, but we haven’t taught people how to be successful in housing. Most people think dropping someone into housing solves the problem, but in reality that’s just the beginning. Life skills must be taught and made mandatory. You can’t just set up someone’s cell phone, you must teach them how to use it. You can’t just show someone how to check their email, you must teach them how to use a computer. We need to be taught how to figure out what we want instead of what’s given to us. We need to get out of the “hustle” and get into living. We’ve been given this enormous gift of housing, but too many aren’t successful. But they’re in housing so we figure it’s a success when it’s not fully.
The missing piece must be the teaching. We’ve been out of society for the most part for way too long and we need to be retaught. Recently on a local news program MDHA was showing the viewers the missing piece. They had in-house programs that taught these important life skills that are taken for granted. This makes housing a success. When we have a budget to live by, we have finally taken control of our lives. Isn’t that the real goal? To make sure those who have been living on the streets and in missions feel like successful human beings again? When we know before the 5th of the month that we can’t make our rent and start making a plan to get the money. It’s called living again. It’s not survival mode. It’s even been suggested in small circles that it be made mandatory as part of the yearly recertification process.
I’ve seen many residents that are still doing “the hustle” to make it every day. They aren’t growing. They are staying stagnant in homelessness even while in housing. In order to break this cycle, we must have true wrap around services in the follow up. In order to make housing a success we must have true wrap around services instead of letting the back half hang out. People have been reaching out to me and I’m so flattered by this, knowing I’m thinking like most. Now it’s time to create the housing success.