The Meaning of Home- Voices from the Streets

By Anne Kidd

Written by an outreach worker in a homeless support program in Melbourne, Australia, The Meaning of Home- Voices from the Streets, describes the experience of supporting nine people who have no home, and the efforts of finding long-term housing for them. It also explores the meaning of home from various perspectives and challenges our preconceived ideas on what having a home might mean.
Taking us deep into the worlds of Ben, Brad, Barry, Cassie, Mandy, Sally, John, Gary and Robbie, Anne Kidd provides insight into life on the streets. Her clients’ experiences are both tragic and traumatic, yet Kidd’s compassionate and sensitive narrative highlights the resilience, courage and forbearance of these disadvantaged people. By describing the circumstances that led each individual to a life of homelessness, Kidd debunks the myths about the stereotypical ‘homeless person’ and reminds us that the reasons for homelessness are multiple, unpredictable and varied.
The book also challenges our assumptions of what ‘home’ means. Home is not simply a structure with four walls and a roof; it can also mean having a secure sense of self, a place of safety and comfort, a connection to something meaningful, and the familiarity of community.
The book is divided into four parts. In the first section, Kidd describes the homeless support program in which she worked, providing a socio/political context to ‘housing first’ programs in Australia. Homelessness is defined and the core premise of the book – that a homeless person is foremost an individual with their own story to tell – is established.
The second part elaborates on the notion of home as defined by Ken Kraybill Director of Training Centre for Social Innovation Seattle, Washington: the self (‘the first home’), the actual dwelling (‘the second home’), and the wider community (‘the third home’). Kidd uses the stories of Ben, Brad, Barry, Cassie, Gary, Mandy, John, Robbie and Sally to tease out and exemplify these definitions.
The third section introduces the idea that home can be defined as a connection to something meaningful. Through describing the day-to-day experiences of her clients, Kidd reminds us that home can mean positive relationships with family and making sense of the past.
Part four describes the ending of the program due to loss of funding. Kidd reflects on the personal impact of working with the homeless and the lessons learned: patience, compassion, holding faith. It brings together the various meanings of home and concludes by celebrating the indomitability of the human spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne Kidd
• Release date: May 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310328732

Anne Kidd

Anne Kidd is a qualified social worker. She worked in the community welfare field for 26 years in Melbourne Australia before moving to Canberra in October 2018. She worked in child protection, the adoption area, home based care, a crisis accommodation service for homeless young people and with adults who experienced long term homelessness. Anne most recently worked with Forgotten Australians, former Child Migrants and the Stolen Generations, adults who as children were placed in state institutional care such as children's homes and orphanages. She assisted them to access their records of their time in care.

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The Meaning of Home

Voices from the Streets

Anne Kidd

Copyright © 2016 Anne Kidd

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Disclaimer-note from the author

The stories and characters in this book are loosely based on composite figures and not representative of any individual person who I worked with over the three year period. Aspects of characters and events that happened whilst I was an outreach case manager have been changed to protect individuals. Given the awful things that happened in people’s lives it has been important to protect their identities to avoid further pain or distress. I have given them different names and changed parts of their lives to ensure their anonymity.

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART ONE

Chapter 1

A paradigm shift

Chapter 2

Why Homelessness?

Chapter 3

Searching for meaning in the ordinary and in the everyday

Chapter 4

John’s story

Chapter 5

My experience of home

Chapter 6

Defining home-less-ness and home

PART TWO

Chapter 7

Kraybill’s definitions of home

‘The First Home’

Chapter 8

Sally-bereft of the ‘first home’-long term effects of childhood abuse

Brad-where did he belong?

A leaf in the wind

Chapter 9

The ‘Second Home’

Cassie- sleeping out

Gary- sleeping out

John- jackets and pockets

Nestled in the hills

Chapter 10

‘The Second Home’ - a place of discomfort, loneliness, strangeness and fear

Mandy-Carting the past in bags

A letter box means home but only when you are ready

The street is often a ‘Second Home’

Brad-when ‘The Second Home’ is not really home

Brad - barbeque chicken

Chapter 11

The ‘Second Home’

Brad-a place of memories and a place to dream

Bearing witness-Brad’s story

Sally-a house built on shifting sands.

Chapter 12

‘The Third Home’

Gary-waiting under the sorry wall

Chapter 13

‘The Third Home’-Robbie’s ‘home’

PART THREE

Chapter 14

Home - a connection to something meaningful

Leaving notes under the door

Home means finding out the truth- when a birth certificate is more than just a piece of paper

Chapter 15

Cassie and her mother-the enduring hold of primary relationships

Cassie-the overflowing slurpee and spring rolls

Chapter 16

Meeting Cassie’s mother

Chapter 17

Knitting the threads

John-understanding his roots

John-meeting his brothers

Chapter 18

Ben-folding clothes

PART FOUR

Conclusions and goodbyes

Chapter 19

The anchor holds

Barry-bedbugs and bloody sores

Finding peace

Chapter 20

Lessons learned

Chapter 21

Saying goodbye the final time-always and forever

Acknowledgements and thanks

Bibliography

Introduction

This book is a reflection of some my experiences as an outreach case manager working with homeless people in Melbourne Australia. It is confined to a three year period from early 2010 to 2012, although I have been working in the welfare field for over twenty years. I was compelled to write after starting to work with people who were experiencing and living a life of homelessness. I was profoundly affected by their courage and their ability to keep going in spite of repeated setbacks and terrible things happening to them. I want to bring their stories to light so that their voices can be heard. For too long they have suffered the stigma of being known and labeled as the homeless. But they are real people with amazing stories of hardship and survival. Many have been let down by their family and the system -they have not had it easy. Their stories deserve to be told and understood. Their lived experience of homelessness also prompted me to question and consider what home meant to me.

I soon realized that the meaning of home was not straight forward. It meant different things according to whatever was happening in my life at the time. For example, the idea of home changed according to my age, whether my parents were together, and then later, whether my children were living with me, or had flown the coup and were living somewhere else. Home was about relationships. I then considered home from a purely housing perspective as the homeless are without a home in the traditional sense of a house with four walls and a roof. Does home mean something physical and tangible, bricks and mortar, or is it something much broader? Is a house therefore a home or does it require something else before it can be called a home? I knew home could mean a spiritual connection to land and place. People will often say they feel at home in a particular setting, such as out in nature, or that they feel ‘at home’ with certain groups of people. The streets were also home to many people I worked with. And when an Australian citizen dies abroad, the overriding consideration and imperative of family members ‘back home’ is that the body must be brought home-the final resting place. Home has many nuanced meanings and means different things to different people.

This account and exploration of the meaning of home and homelessness that follows, weaves together and highlights the many varied meanings of home. It takes into consideration the meaning of home and homelessness from sociological and personal perspectives through the work that I did with people who were living and experiencing homelessness. These lived experiences and their stories, snapshots if you like, happened in time and space over a three year period. However, the experiences often spark a thought and my mind reminisces back to an earlier incident or a part of my own family history, helping me make sense of what home means. The stories are personal anecdotes that happened to me, overlaid by the experiences of the people I had the privilege of working with over a three year period. It is not linear as memories are often recalled at random and not sequentially. Stories are added to all the time and this was how I also learnt about the lives of the people I worked with. It was often a painful, slow process, just as my own understanding of significant incidents in my life evolved over time. These things can never be rushed. A connection is made and the sense of home and what it means becomes clearer to me, although sometimes it raised more questions.

I also hope to open up new vistas of understanding so that the idea of home is thought about in ways that might not have been considered before. More importantly, I hope the idea of home in relation to what I learnt through working with homeless people will help raise awareness of the plight of many of the most disadvantaged and marginalized in our society. For too long they have been misunderstood and in many cases maligned.

But this is only one perspective of home, as everyone’s experience is unique to them. These stories are interrelated on many different levels but are fundamentally about me and my experience of home. After all, the word me, is in home. The word pictures that follow are much more than fragments or threads, as they weave together the story that is about home and what it means to me.

I have also learnt a lot about myself and the people I have worked with in ‘bearing witness’ to their stories of abuse and trauma. Listening to their accounts of their lives has made me more appreciative and more grateful for my friends and family, the things that really matter. But above all, they have taught me to be more humble, patient, accepting and compassionate. This book is a testament to the courage and resilience of the people that I have worked with and is my way of giving back to them. I did not fully realize the impact the relationships had on me until much later, when I no longer had the opportunity to see or talk to the people I had grown so very fond of. I was certainly touched and emotionally affected by the experiences that we shared together. Even though I worked within the professional boundaries of my profession, I could not help but be deeply moved on a personal level. It was impossible not to be. It was a two way process. The relationships that we shared were based on two way transactions, a give and take, an intimacy and a learned understanding of someone else’s foibles, habits and manner of speech developed over a three year period. They had given a lot of themselves within the relationship, but I had underestimated what I had also given. I had exposed myself to my own vulnerabilities and my deepest fears- that part of me that I so fiercely protect and the source of my sadness.

I hope these experiences and what I learnt over this time might be of some relevance to new social workers embarking on careers in the welfare field or social work students grappling with how to put theory into practice. I was often too deeply immersed in my work early in my career, and too busy ‘doing’ to really understand exactly what ‘it’ was that I was doing. I know I was ‘helping’ people because I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives- but it is really about helping people to help themselves- only they can do that. Inadvertently, they were also ‘helping’ me to become a better person and to appreciate the importance of home. This was one of the most significant lessons that I learnt over the three years of working with people experiencing homelessness.

PART ONE

Chapter 1

A paradigm shift

I started my career as a social worker in the early 1990s in child protection. I finally left after about ten years, utterly exhausted, both physically and mentally. I was scared at what I had done to myself. I was burnt out but it was the wakeup call that I needed, as I felt like I had pushed myself to breaking point. I drew a line in the sand where work was concerned and have never allowed myself to step over it, knowing my limit. I then changed paths and worked in adoption and permanent care followed by home based care supporting carers look after high risk adolescents. Before working with homeless adults I worked in a crisis accommodation centre for homeless young people in inner Melbourne. I loved working with young people although the long term housing options available then were fairly limited. It was frustrating not being able to access good long term housing for homeless young people who also had additional complex needs such as drug and alcohol, mental health issues and low self esteem due to sexual abuse. Many were unsupported and disconnected from family due to family violence. I became disillusioned that as a worker I could not offer better, safer outcomes for vulnerable young people. Those pathways and options were scarce and often had long waiting lists. Towards the end of 2009 I looked for a further change and challenge.

Back in 2010 many innovative homeless outreach services started in Melbourne, coinciding with ‘Street to Home’ (STH) programs being initiated across Australia. Such programs were designed to reduce homelessness in response to the Commonwealth government’s 2008 White Paper, The Road Home. ‘Street to Home’ programs as they were known at the time, represented a paradigm shift in the response to homelessness in Australia (Kahn, 2011). The change or paradigm shift as seen in these new services and programs was a move away in part from the ‘transitional’ approach to assisting people who were homeless. Implicit in the policy changes and program changes generated by ‘Street to Home’ and Housing First initiatives, was the claim that people experiencing homelessness should no longer be moved through a continuum of transitional type housing interventions such as crisis, emergency and short term accommodation options before they are provided with permanent housing (Kahn, 2011). Ideally, as the research showed, to best end the cycle of homelessness, permanent housing should be provided first, as the first option.

It was therefore exciting to work in the area of homelessness at that time. I changed jobs and worked as an outreach case manager in inner Melbourne in a small community organization focused on reducing homelessness. The aim of the program that I worked in was to support people experiencing chronic long term homelessness access suitable, long term, permanent housing. However, in keeping with the paradigm shift, the difference would be that as outreach case managers, we would also continue to support people in maintaining their housing over a longer period of time. We were responsible for supporting the same eight or nine homeless people designated to each of us over a three year period. In effect, we developed close relationships with each person over this time frame given the nature of the work and our level of involvement and the intensity of the work. All the participants wanted to be part of the program because they wanted support to end their homelessness. They were committed to us being involved for a few years and understood that we would provide ongoing support after they were housed. We worked 9am to 5pm 5 days a week. Our primary role was to get permanent housing as quickly as possible, through public housing (Office of Housing) or long term community housing and support people with their needs and issues as they settled into a life ‘off the streets’.

The program was based on extensive research of the homeless sector both in Australia and overseas. The program recognized that being housed was just the first step toward a life out of chronic homelessness and that there were in fact many other underlying issues in a person’s life that needed to be addressed. It was often these other issues, if left unaddressed which continued to marginalize those experiencing homelessness and perpetuate the cycle of homelessness. Over time, we understood that the effects of homelessness were also the causes of ongoing homelessness. Being housed did not end severe mental illness or put an end to substance abuse disorders for example. Being housed did not automatically resolve long standing family issues or change disruptive patterns of behaviours or even make someone more responsible or accountable for their actions. Being housed was often the first step in many steps to a life out of homelessness and for many a life out of the ‘homeless street drug sub culture’.

Most of our work was outreach, taking people to drug and alcohol appointments or medical, mental health appointments, visiting them where they staying or meeting up for coffee somewhere safe. We constantly sourced affordable white goods or accessed specialist services through the legal, justice system, depending on what people needed. We attended court, on far too many occasions for some, and visited people in both the male and female prisons and remand centres, advocating and liaising with lawyers. At other times we encouraged people to build on their strengths and positives and their skill base, by starting a work related course or an art course or basic computer course. We were ‘the go to people’, whilst providing corrective and positive relationships, sometimes for the first time in someone’s life. Many of the participants had only ever experienced negative and abusive relationships.

There was a transitional period as the people we worked with moved out of and further away from a life of being homeless to a life of being housed and of having a home. This transitional period was different for each person we worked with. Unfortunately for some, the transition was very transitory and they were unable to maintain their housing, slipping back into past negative patterns and a life of homelessness.

Whilst the primary functions and tasks of our case management approach changed over time depending on the issues and stages of a person’s journey out of homelessness or their recovery from trauma, the relationships remained constant throughout the three years. For example, as workers, we stayed and moved through the various stages of trauma recovery with the people we worked with. We continued to offer support once they were housed to sustain their tenancies long-term. We assisted and helped them to bridge the gap to social inclusion and to move out of the homeless sub -culture that often weighed them down and pulled them back. We helped to equip them with the necessary skills to build their own social networks and reconnect to the mainstream community. And when they were pulled back into familiar destructive patterns of behavior and lost their housing, we continued to support them and encourage them to have another go. And when they tested us to see if we would reject them like others had countless time in their lives, we stuck around.

Chapter 2

Why Homelessness?

I was in my late fifties when I started working with people who had experienced long term homelessness. I was drawn to this area of work for a number of reasons. I thought that I had a reasonably broad, first hand understanding of the issues faced by people who were the most marginalized and disadvantaged within the community through the work that I had done over the years. In addition to working in child protection where things at home were not always good for children, I had worked in adoption (local, i.e. not overseas adoption) and permanent care (where children are permanently placed in foster care). I had assessed carers who wanted to look after children and couples who were applying to adopt children within Victoria, and worked in a refuge for homeless young people. All good reasons to think I had the necessary skills to work with the homeless.

And then it finally dawned on me why I had been drawn to the area of homelessness. What had been in front of me all along became even more obvious. Home. All the jobs I had been in were about home; children in homes, children in need of homes, couples wanting to provide a home for children, young people kicked out of home, children removed from home and parents not able to provide a safe home for their children. I supported parents to ensure their children were safe at home. And there was me the worker, my role as the go between, trying to find a ‘home’ for children and young people even though many had a home. The meaning of home suddenly became much more significant. Now it was the homeless and trying to find them a home. What did home mean to them?

I considered all this more carefully. Maybe I was working with people who were experiencing homelessness because there were specific lessons I needed to learn. Were there questions that I needed to answer? Perhaps I was subconsciously aware of this before I even started this work and that is why I ended up working in the area. I needed to work out what home meant to me, and more importantly, where did I belong? Could that be the lesson for me? I then knew it was no accident that I ended up working with the homeless.

Work defines who we are as a person. Work is not the sum total of what we are, but nevertheless, it is a part of who we are. There is a boundary between our private life and our working life but we do occupy both worlds. It is part of our identity. Work is, and certainly has been a big part of who I am. Similarly, for the people I worked with they had many parts to who they were. They also had questions they were grappling with just like me. For example, Sally a young woman I worked with, mentioned that she did not want to be known as