Search Results

Traditional service delivery for homeless youths consists of residential as well as outreach and shelter services. Although traditional services aim to mitigate the health, mental health, and social problems of homeless youths, this approach fails to replace their street-survival behaviors with other legal, income-generating activities. Due to its focus on meeting these youths’ basic needs, traditional service provision reflects the remedial or maintenance-consumption approach to social work. In the case of homeless youths, successful strategies to move them from the informal to the formal economy require more than employment in low-paying positions, since their formal labor-market participation is often hindered by the challenges inherent in living on the streets. This chapter describes existing social investment strategies for homeless youths and suggests that through social enterprises, these youths can acquire vocational and business skills, mentorship, clinical treatment, and linkages to services to facilitate their economic and social self-sufficiency.

This chapter tries to explain why banishment reemerged as a leading social control strategy. It lists several developments that contributed to its rise, such as the increase in the homeless population and public concern about disorder. It studies broken windows policing and the invalidation of loitering laws and vagrancy. It also identifies some alternative social control mechanisms, including civility and banishment.

This chapter details the departure of Gotama from the palace for a homeless life. Life in the palace became ugly and gloomy. One day an inhabitant of the heavens appeared before Gotama in the form of an ascetic. The recluse told him that his knowledge that life was nothing more than an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth had led him to adopt the homeless life. Relatives and strangers had become the same for him; greed and hate had ceased to be. He told Gotama that wherever he found himself, at the root of a tree, a deserted sanctuary, a hill, or a wood, that became his home. He had no possessions, no expectations; intent on gaining freedom from rebirth, he accepted whatever was given to him. And then before Gotama's very eyes he flew off into the sky. Gotama now knew very clearly what had to be done, and he made plans to leave the palace for the homeless life.

Explores three sermons by Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa and commonly titled “On the Love of the Poor” that focus on the homeless and destitute diseased poor. While both authors also define the sick body in terms of kinship and as a divine and permeable membrane for reverse contagion (healing) in a mutable cosmos, Gregory of Nyssa emphasizes civic gift exchange and ceremony in constructing a Christian place for these diseased poor, while Gregory of Nazianzus emphasizes a theology of Christian incarnation, viewing the poor as Christ. Their views of leprosy resemble the medical description by Aretaeus of Cappadocia and theories of disease causation in Graeco‐Roman medicine

This chapter discusses issues in the provision of palliative care to homeless people. Palliative care provision must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate complex needs. In the UK, the relative independence of many hospices allows for a person-centred approach that can be tailored for those who are homeless. One group of homeless people suggested a dedicated half-way house shelter, staffed twenty-four hours a day, to provide a safe convalescent environment on leaving hospital.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to present a ‘contextual’ study of the implementation of Britain's homelessness legislation, legislation which was initially enacted as the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977, and is now contained in Part III of the Housing Act 1985. The book's central theme is that law operates not in a context, but in a variety of interdependent contexts. Consequently, the purpose and effect of legal change can only be properly understood if one makes an attempt to discern the interactive effect of as many as possible of the influences bearing upon it. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter discusses innovative programs and practice approaches in working with homeless persons. It begins by identifying the characteristics of the homeless population. It highlights three nonexclusive categories of homeless women as particularly vulnerable subgroups within the homeless population: women with children, women with chronic mental illness. The chapter then presents service delivery innovations such as enriched service emergency shelters, transitional living facilities, and permanent housing with services. It describes the empowerment approach by providing examples of empowerment group work, political activities, and individual- and family-oriented empowerment programs for homeless and formerly homeless men, women, and children in Hartford, Connecticut. Implications for future policy, practice, and research are presented.

This chapter focuses on the women's benevolent institutions. They were in place in 1880 dispensing aid on a regular basis. By ministering the poor, benevolent ladies understood the degree of dependency that was created through increased industrialization and growth. Catholic women's religious orders were the first to build benevolent institutions in Galveston. Ursuline nuns accompanied Bishop John Mary Odin to Galveston and formed the Ursuline Academy and convent. They acted as nurses. They converted their convent to a military hospital during the Civil War. Galveston's middle- and upper-class women sought to capitalize on the wave of pride and donation to build institutions of their own — for children and old women. Lasker Home for Homeless Children and the Johanna Runge Free Kindergarten pulled women toward a greater sense of civic and community responsibility. These institutions were temporary shelters for children whose family was unable to offer an education.

Preventing and ending homelessness requires actions at multiple levels. HOD researchers have contributed by analysing the structural causes of homelessness and their links to social exclusion, by empirical work with collaborators and policy engagement at the national and local levels. A national 12-site experiment examines what interventions work best to end homelessness for families. Qualitative interviews help to understand families’ experiences, their access to supports, the ways they make housing decisions, and the ways that programs separate family members from one another. Work in New York City and Alameda County California helps homeless service administrators target prevention services to people who can derive greatest benefit from them and evaluates a prevention program. Local work in Nashville responds to needs identified by the homeless service system.

The ethnographic research carried out across a number of European countries demonstrates that while there are some differences in the nature, experience of and response to women’s homelessness across the EU, the similarities in relation to this are more remarkable. In order to learn from this we need to pay more attention to women’s life stories in the context of those individuals and agencies with whom they come into contact so that we can reflect on their meaning in the construction and maintenance of different cultures which are interactively and discursively constructed across a number of dimensions. This information needs to be further analysed so that the homeless archipelago becomes part of a wider and more responsive system.

This chapter describes Cairo, Egypt and evaluates the most common type of imaging to which Cairo is subject. It aims to inform the reader that there are numerous ways Cairo can be taken and observed, and to provide a forewarning of some of the more common pitfalls and distortions found in the literature. These distortions include the number of homeless people and street children in this city. This chapter suggests that the single strongest pull in the imaging of Cairo is probably the city's historical dimension.

This chapter discusses Mary (Kingsland) Higgs, who was a prolific writer and a social reformer whose interest and range extended from the needs of the poor, to early childhood, urban beautification, Depression-era unemployment, and the rejuvenation of Christianity. Higgs was an activist, working to found gardens and parks, helping crippled children, and rescuing prostitutes. She was best known for her involvement with vagrants and the issue of homeless people, work she continued until the 1930s. This chapter presents one of Higgs' incognito investigations of the lives of homeless women. Higgs first encountered homeless women when she served as a Secretary of the Ladies Committee. In 1899, she set up a small independent shelter for homeless women and later established lodging houses for women in Oldham. In addition, she set up model workrooms for women needing employment and opposed conscription.

This chapter considers how mentally ill homeless people in New York City rework psychiatric personhood and patienthood outside clinical networks, examining the interstitiality and uncertainty of these homeless people, which requires constant negotiation of identity as they go through a generalized lack of empathy. It also studies how homeless subjectivities are constructed.