The Social Worker's Master Key

Initially I was bewildered why homeless people have so much trouble accessing support at one service or the other, but when I call on their behalf with the ‘I'm a Social Worker'  attached to my call... all of a sudden doors open, respect for the client's situation is shown and reasonable minds tend to prevail.

Fair enough I place some pretty confronting questions in the foreground like ‘Why is this a problem?' or ‘How can we move forward and look after this person?' etc... and in the background they get ‘I'm a Social Worker' and ‘This is an important person who is a client of mine.'

I'm not talking about putting unreasonable pressure on service providers. Usually the back story emerges and the barriers to entry are explained. Staff room type discussions where two professionals get together on a problem to solve it... where possible.

But there is a regular flow of problems that emerge typically from two scenarios regarding homelessness:

1. The homeless person is abrasive and pissed off, and the service provider won't provide a service for people who are bad advocates for their case and rub them the wrong way.
2. Organizational policies, practices, and constraints get in the way of common sense and good practice.

Here are two examples:

Example 1: A service provider gives a cranky client bus fare to get to a medical appointment in another town (under $10). The service provider gives them a one way bus ticket to their appointment. The client is stuck there after their appointment and calls me, I call the service provider... to get them to send someone to meet the client with a return bus ticket to get home from their appointment.

Why a return ticket wasn't supplied in the first place fails me. The client gets stuffed about and left out on a limb just because they were abrasive? This is a very common barrier to support.

Example 2: A mother with two year old twins is turned away from a welfare service to return to living under a bridge with her young children. The client calls me, I call the service provider... ‘They have exceeded the amount of support we can offer one client in a given quarter.' That was the initial response.

Could be my rant helped them re-consider this policy of ‘only so much support per quarter.' As you would imagine I started out with ‘Are you f'n kidding me?'

Dig a little deeper and I hear ‘doesn't she know she qualifies for this and qualifies for that, why is she living on the streets with those kids why doesn't she do a, b, and c?'  My obvious next question... ‘Have you outlined those opportunities to the client?' You guessed their response ‘No, she should know that.'

Long story short -- after my advocacy that day she was given emergency shelter, a voucher for groceries (twice what they usually give), street to door transport (by me), and transitioned into stable priority government housing within the week.

Without my intervention, the crappy service provider would have sent her back to live under a bridge with two year old children simply because the workers were following the company line. In doing so, they would have also failed the person in front of them and her homeless children.

Why can't service providers just be patient and get it right in the first place? Competing demands on their resources and time is the usual reason or excuse.

There are so many examples of homeless people who, in all honesty,  don't fall through the cracks in the system - they just get treated like shit and the system doesn't work for them because they present with challenging needs or illogical organizational constraints and practices get in the way and the system fails all by itself.

Both of these very common reasons why organizations fail homeless people cause enormous hurt and leave people stranded, and less likely to seek help again.

When the client's needs truly don't marry up to the way the system works - it's time to get the client's needs met by changing the system... which usually comes down to stretching organizational practices or even changing them.

A lot of workers will stretch the envelope, break organizational rules and cater to people's needs but sadly this level of flexibility is only made available when workers like me advocate for clients and put pressure on service providers.

It annoys the hell out of me, that homeless people can't get the same level of what would you call it ‘customer service' by themselves, but I can get the red carpet rolled out just because they respect my comment or question at a staff room level colleague type conversation because I'm a Social Worker.

Why not just treat the homeless with the respect you show me, the Social Worker?

My qualification happens to be Social Worker, there are many other people working with other titles or some volunteers even who can use the credibility of the organization they volunteer with. There are a lot of people who can speak up for you and use whatever organizational credibility or personal rank they can muster and advocate on your behalf.

If you are homeless - use these advocates. If you have trouble, get people to advocate for you. No matter the professional qualification or organization many workers fail homeless people. But when you have an advocate on your side from another service...  things tend to go more smoothly, rules get broken, flexibility is amazingly possible, the how to access what you need is spelt out.

There is no excuse for why it doesn't just work this way for every homeless person in the first place.

The truth is Social Workers have to some extent got master keys for the system. We can open doors homeless people can't and the true job of a Social Worker is to change the system so it does work for people.

What frustrates me is that I have to crack the whip on the system and that it doesn't just work the way it should in the first place. Time and again, homeless people don't fall through the cracks in the system; service providers just fail homeless people miserably.

No doubt there are plenty of frustrations you have experienced either as a service provider or as a client of homeless services. Feel free to share your experiences and frustrations in the comments section.

Everyone is welcome to join the discussion in the International Homeless Forum on issues like this one and many more.

Image from Bohman's public Flickr photo stream.