During recent meetings with the directors of organizations working on homelessness, I learned more about a concept that is at the very heart of their work: social reaffiliation.
This is what we call the process taken by a person who seeks to reintegrate into a social group after a period of marginalization or exclusion. The objective is to work on the relationship of trust, dignity, self-awareness and the feeling of having control over one’s life and one’s future, by establishing a balance between autonomy and belonging to a group.
It is a demanding process since it requires facing several obstacles, such as social stigmatization, lack of self-confidence and fear of rejection. It also requires the support of a variety of health, social and community service professionals.
We see it well in our personal lives: social support plays a key role and directly influences our emotional well-being and mental health.
But the most important thing in a process of social reaffiliation is that the expertise does not only come from professionals and programs: it is generated by the person himself, the one who is experiencing the situation and who is accompanied according to its needs.
This is what makes roaming very complex: there is no solution applicable to everyone. This conflicts with the principle that, in society, we must proceed by general programs, a personalized approach being impossible to manage.
Thus, during my meetings with the heads of community organizations, a constant emerges, that of the use of the expression “small boxes”. Generally, the expression is accompanied by mimed quotation marks, but especially by a very long sigh at the end of a diatribe which expresses frustration about the difficulties in finding funding.
For homelessness, the logic of the “boxes to tick” is a vector of exclusion as the situations differ, which generates a lot, a lot of work for the management of organizations that try to “fit” their activities into the particularities of the various programs.
Collaboration and decompartmentalization
Imagine that you run a community organization and are looking for funding. Your steps will lead you to several ministries and their many agencies, or even to cities, which represent as many silos as there are different programs.
The homeless person trying to reintegrate into society needs to receive continuous services for several years; she can easily find herself struggling with a concomitance of problems, for example substance abuse and mental health. And it is here that the small boxes make life difficult for the leaders of organizations, who must multiply the demands to be able to assert the rights and needs of people experiencing homelessness.
For those involved in the fight against homelessness – funders and organizations – this poses a challenge of collaboration.
For departments already very busy with the internal issues of their organization, this involves many hours trying to fit their interventions into specific little boxes.
Work on homelessness and its causes needs to grow, and so does collaboration.
For funders – governments, cities, private and public foundations – it is entirely legitimate to want to know as much as possible about the impact of their investments and to be accountable to their stakeholders. This posture will not change, but it must evolve. We must continue to discuss funding by program, which leads to compartmentalization in all areas.
Fortunately, we are seeing great openings emerging, which bring hope, because the more we decompartmentalize funding, the less we try to direct action. And the more we trust the experts in the field, the more we are glued to the concerns of the people affected by the situation.
Right now, we’re talking more about homelessness because it’s more visible, throughout Greater Montreal. But it is too often decked out with the word problem right in front of it, especially when talking about security. This security that we are all looking for is probably the first word that would come to the mouth of a homeless person if asked how they really want to feel. And reclaiming this sense of security takes time.
When I talk about poverty, I prefer to talk about the possibilities that we can and must foresee. In doing so, we project ourselves, we elevate the discourse and, inevitably, the tone is more calm, visionary, solution-oriented.
After all, social reaffiliation, while complex, is not limited to homelessness. It is a process of inclusion that is done with respect and dignity for people, not by ticking small boxes.