By Senior Director of Programs and Operations Jeannine Short
In response to the Federal 10-year plan to end homelessness, Community LINC has realigned its programs and service delivery model with the objective of serving more homeless families. To this end, we have adopted the rapid rehousing and housing-first models and their consequent paradigms…. Well, at least to some degree.
In general, these paradigms purport that: 1) homeless persons are more receptive to services provided in their own environment, 2) homeless persons need not be made “housing-ready”, 3) issues, such as substance abuse and mental illness, should not be barriers to housing, and 4) embraces a “harm reduction” methodology which challenges the rigidity of long-standing rules and regulations. While these models are gaining wide acceptance throughout the social service industry at large, the approaches are still relatively new and the long-term impact currently unknown.
As a learning organization, Community LINC has done well to understand and even implement some of these new service delivery approaches. However, we have to ask ourselves the hard question of just how far we should go. Do we incorporate the whole of these emerging paradigms because it appears that such will become future best practice? By doing so, would we on an agency level actually be embracing the “one-size-fits-all” ideology that the paradigms are designed to mitigate? If we exercise latitude in deciding what works best for our agency, will our services and methods be deemed antiquated and eventually become obsolete?
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