A Leg to Stand On

I am a visual person and sometimes picturing things helps me conceptualize ideas I'm trying to explain. Employment for the homeless is an issue we have discussed a great deal on this blog, and it is important to see the connection between confidence and competence. If an individual has poor self image, it effects their job performance.

Imagine your self-esteem is a table and the legs represent your health, work, home and emotional support respectively. If one leg buckles, it puts pressure on the others. If another leg goes, the table crashes to the ground. Each one is connected to the other, and while they stand alone, the picture is not complete unless each one works in conjunction with the others. Imbalance leads to collapse. This simple analogy not only helps explain how anyone can become homeless, but also why getting homeless people back into sustained work is a complex challenge. Sadly, we often see just the surface of the broken table without understanding which leg is broken.

Getting homeless people into sustained employment is not just about putting a roof over their heads and bringing their qualifications, interview techniques and experience up to par. These factors are important but, in isolation, do not help solve the problem with lasting permanence. You can give someone a house, but they're still mentally homeless if they don't know how to interact with others. These social and interpersonal variables need to be changed to constants.

Many homeless people people lack life skills that are grown and cultivated by simply living in a stable and fixed environment. These include self-confidence, self-awareness and the ability to structure a day. Things that many housed people take for granted, as part of a daily routine, must be relearned by people who transition from being homeless to having a permanent address. Most people who have a support network of friends, family and work take these skills for granted. But without them, sustaining employment can be incredibly difficult.

Job services and employment counseling are key components in the ready-to-work scheme. Clearly, sustainable employment will be difficult if long-term support in the workplace is not mirrored outside it. If a person has stable housing but has a current mental health or substance abuse problem with which they are not getting any support, it is going to put a strain on employment. Work alone is not enough to prevent people from falling back into homelessness, although the value of sustainable employment cannot be underscored.

An essential step forward in terms of homelessness would be to step back and focus on the skills that can give someone a quality of life. Funding for programs that accomplished this, rather than just those that put a roof over people's heads, are vital for the construction of a lasting and efficient system. Thinking needs to change in seeing life skills as the way out of homelessness. Perhaps then our table will have a leg to stand on.