More Research on The Barriers to Overcoming Houselessness

Yo yo everyone! Or should I say cough cough everyone, as this week started with sickness. But after that little hiccup, this week was one of my most successful when it came to my senior project. I was able to schedule many interviews and gain many more contacts.

After calling six different shelters all throughout the Bay Area, it became clear that it would be difficult to schedule interviews with houseless people at shelters, as they all had some policies that would prevent that from happening for privacy purposes. Respecting this, I inquired if I could talk to people working with the houseless people as that would also give me important points for my research.

The people I was referred to were case workers who are not social workers, but individuals that are employed that help specific clients from beginning to end of their journey, ensuring that they are given the services they need. I am meeting with some case workers from WeHope and SafeFirst in this upcoming week. I’ve prepared questions for them that will help me with my project.

Additionally, since interviewing houseless people is an important part of my project, and I believe it will be an extremely impactful and touching part of my end product, I asked my external advisors for advice. Though it wasn’t possible to interview houseless people from shelters themselves, my external advisors from Simply Shelters, have direct contacts to houseless people they have helped. My external advisors are assisting me in scheduling times to go to Santa Cruz and interview them in the upcoming week too. 

Interviews with case workers, houseless people, and social workers will give me insight to the bureaucratic and physical barriers to overcoming homelessness, but when it comes to social barriers… that is you guys! I want to understand how social stigmas shape how we view homelessness, and how this may act as a barrier too. Currently I’m reading two extremely interesting articles, “Why Homelessness is Stigmatized,” and “A systematic review of the effect of stigma on the health of people experiencing homelessness,” which are giving me questions that I can ask around our school to understand the stigma that surrounds the topic of homelessness. The questions and inquiries I ask will be answered consensually and anonymously and are solely for my research purposes. 

To ensure that questions for my peers at school, houseless individuals, social workers, and case workers are respecting their work and privacy, I will run them by my advisors in the next few days so that next week can be solely interview based.

See you next week with another banging blog!