The National Coalition for the Homeless is thrilled to announce that we will be partnering with Destination: Home, a California-based housing agency that is committed to taking and building the leadership of people who have lived experience with homelessness, to hold the 2024 National Lived Experience Leadership Conference in San Jose, CA.
More details will be release soon. Call for proposals is live. Submissions are due by July 8, 2024.
The National Coalition for the Homeless welcomes advocates, service providers, and especially leaders who have experienced homelessness to our 2023 Leadership Conference. The Conference will take place over the course of 2 days, Friday, September 29, 2023 and Saturday, September 30, 2023. The daily schedule will run from 9am through the evening. We suggest making plans to travel on Thursday, September 28th and Sunday, October 1, if possible.
A gathering of people with previous experience with homelessness on November 12, 2022 to set a national agenda for ending housing instability in America.
Why Do We Need to Meet?
For 42 years, the National Coalition for the Homeless has worked to amplify the voices of those without housing on the national level. We have worked with leaders on the local level to bring their voices to Congress and to the attention of national media. We have regular interaction with advocates in the major cities in the United States and receive input from people living in urban and rural environments. NCH is governed by a majority of people with previous experience and we have a sizable number of our staff who were once homeless. We believe that it is critical for the groups to meet together to share common advocacy strategies, find out about the obstacles faced by other communities, and to work together on a common agenda.
In 2015, we held a gathering in Denver, Colorado of over 100 individuals who all represented constituents of people currently or formerly homeless. This gathering was the beginning of the strategic planning process, and an event in Washington would be the continuation of that movement. We had some best practices featured and a long day of workshops and the start of building community. A great deal has changed in the last seven years and it is time to complete the work of 2015.
History of Planning:
Because of Covid, we have not been able to meet in person for three years. While we can accomplish a great deal via Zoom, it does not afford the individuals the opportunity to express themselves. We also believe that breaking bread together at a soup kitchen, church basement or a hotel conference room is important for building interpersonal skills and trust among the groups.
In 2021 we held a follow up summit via Zoom in which 65 people attended virtually. We talked about community organizing strategies, we had various leaders talk about successful strategies from the past including demonstrations, using art to win the message, and lawsuits. We talked about how groups sustain themselves and how we can work together going forward. We distributed a community organizing manual that people could use in their local work to lift people up.
Goals for the 2022 Leadership Conference
These are the recommendations from the groups that attended the first organizing meeting.
By Zachary Bernstein, Summer 2021 NCH Civil Rights Intern
During our conversation, Loh asked me to imagine my family and I were victims of one of the wildfires currently ravaging the western part of the country. Imagine your documents—passports, birth certificates, etc.—were destroyed in the fire, Loh said, and you do not qualify for assistance based on your economic status. It takes a while to get those documents back, Loh pointed out, and meanwhile you have nothing, and no help—nothing more than people staying in shelters, or tents in the woods, or directly on the street. “This is how people fall into deep poverty,” Loh told me.
Cleveland is one of the most historic cities in the United States, Loh said, and yet they allow nearly half the children in the city (46.1% in 2019) to live below the poverty line. That means one of every two children does not have enough to eat and goes to bed hungry nearly every night in Cleveland. This is clearly not the fault of each individual person, Loh emphasized again and again, but a failure of the system to keep people from slipping into poverty.
Loh, a community activist in Cleveland, Ohio, works with the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, the Homeless Congress, and with the Poor People’s Campaign to amplify the voices of those struggling with housing. Loh has experienced homelessness for the past ten years. We spoke for just ninety minutes, but over the course of that time, Loh painted me a portrait of a system of shelters, service providers, and government bureaucracy that has failed its most vulnerable citizens at every level. Having dealt with activism and struggling as a person experiencing homelessness and as an activist, Loh understands the ins and outs of this system in great detail—Loh understands why it has allowed its citizens to live on the street, why it has allowed its shelters to fall into disrepair, and why it has repeatedly stonewalled efforts to help these people. But most importantly of all, Loh understands how to thwart that system.
To Loh, the most important principle of organizing for the homeless is that you cannot solely organize people experiencing homelessness. The reason people are homeless, Loh points out, is because they do not have resources, they are already overwhelmed with their own economic and personal issues. In addition, Loh observes, homeless people often do not want to go out of their way to let people know they are homeless. Loh believes that organizing for homeless advocacy must involve targeting those who are housed as well as those with resources and political will. A key is to target the powerful and those who have decision-making authority to enable the movement to thrive and achieve its goals.
In one story Loh told, a class at the Cleveland Institute of Art wanted to start an artistic outreach project for the homeless community, but had several eye-opening experiences attempting to gain access to people staying in shelters, realizing the extent of the systemic failure experienced by the homeless. Working with Loh and other members of the Homeless Congress, one student in the class changed his project to stage mock groundbreaking and ribbon-cutting ceremonies that included testimonials from homeless people about their experiences in shelters. The project got publicity in newspapers, and Loh recalls how people were amazed at the stories that shelter residents had to tell. This is merely one example, but it demonstrates the power of pairing the knowledge of people who are experiencing or have experienced homelessness (such as Loh) with the power, time, and resources of those who are not. “You have to be able to organize people outside the system,” Loh emphasizes. Loh is a fixture at the County Council meetings railing against the lack of oversight of the shelters and services by the funders. By respecting the resources and points of view each other brings to the table, we can build activist movements which have power and influence and are also built around those with lived experience and knowledge of the system.
In speaking about the importance of a systemic understanding, Loh emphasized that it is not enough to merely understand that the police do bad things to the homeless community, or that the justice system is broken, it is necessary to grasp the wider scope of the problem, to understand how systems interlock with one another to produce the problem. This is especially important, Loh says, because homeless people do not have the time or energy to think about why the system does not work. Several of Loh’s stories from the field have demonstrated how the system has failed the homeless community. The story of the art class attempting to reach out to the homeless community is especially demonstrative—at every step, Loh related, the government and service providers would delay or divert their attempts to reach out. When they wanted to create a sculpture for a shelter, they were told that the sculpture had to be metal because, a director told them, the people in the shelter were crazy, angry, stupid, and violent, and would destroy the sculpture in a short time. The reduction and mischaracterization of an entire community based on a dangerous stereotype is just one example of the pervasive and ingrained misunderstanding of the issue of homelessness.
Loh has extensively documented the mistreatment and horrible conditions at shelters with some amount of creatively particularly in the use of photography and poetry. The shelter Loh stays at, which Loh refers to as “The HELL”. In a series of photos and captions, Loh shows insects on the floor of the only area the homeless people are allowed to eat, mold growing on the showers, and broken toilet stall doors. In a poem, Loh describes the inadequate facilities at the shelter which were originally built as two business buildings, and now involves lots of stairs, heavy doors to navigate. Loh characterizes her experiences as painful due to the injuries sustained from the unsafe environment of the shelter. Loh views these problems as a direct result of systemic failure, a system which causes Loh and thousands of others physical pain because of their lack of care. Loh described to me the network of service providers and government agencies in a dizzying flurry of acronyms. These agencies, which purport themselves to be non-profits, have no real intention of helping homeless people, Loh told me, they simply play politics to make more money. “Society produces homeless people,” Loh often says, because there is simply a lack of care and effort put into solving the problem, and these seemingly impenetrable systems of bureaucracy and capital foreclose any attempt at undermining it.
But that does not mean that there are no ways of doing so—in fact, Loh has successfully staged resistance from the inside. On one occasion, Loh was offered housing in response to complaints about the quality of the shelter. When they offered it, Loh asked if they could give 200 units because there are other people with problems like Loh’s—but they refused. Loh observed how demonstrative this experience was of the systemic failure: “You claim you are an organization to help homeless people and especially those with mental health struggles, but you have no real intention to help them.” But Loh also shows us how the system can be undermined—Loh’s request of 200 housing units is a perfect example of a way in which we can take a stand in spite of the failure of the system. Loh’s tireless dedication to solving the problem of homelessness for all and keen focus on understanding the very roots of that problem can inspire us to think in new ways about homelessness and the systems that perpetuate it. After all, if we can understand what causes the problem, we are one step closer to finding its solution.
I have interviewed so many unhoused people who have found the violence, victimization and exploitation of homelessness to be overwhelming.
Check out the Voices of Homelessness Podcast for an in depth look at the reality of homelessness.
Many people experiencing homelessness reject the shelters based on reputation or bad personal experiences within the system. From theft to staff mistreatment, the shelter system in the United States has gone from emergency housing by people of good will to permanent institutional incarceration. I hear all the time, those without housing begging for someone who will understand and will listen in order to help them steer through this most difficult time in their lives. The amount of danger living on the streets is far greater, but there is a degree of freedom outside. US citizens love their freedom. The tremendous loss associated with homelessness in the destruction of family relationships and the giving up all your valuables is often too much to bare for some. These individuals accept their fate as a forever condition and stop trying to find housing or stability.
This is a mock groundbreaking that a group of artists staged in Cleveland for the development of a new women’s shelter designed, built and run by those experiencing homelessness. It never materialized but it was a good idea.
Unfortunately, the social service system is not built to be supportive of the unique needs of most of the population. It is built to be cost effective, sterile, with a rigid code of conduct. It is run like a military barracks with curfews, lights out, no pets or anything comfortable, a schedule for eating, rules and mandates that many compare to a jail that kicks out everyone in the morning who then voluntarily return at night. It is not the shelter provider’s fault. They are dealt a hand that would be impossible to manage in the best of times with full employment, universal health care and cheap housing. The shelters are stuffed every day full of people with multiple barriers to housing. They are regularly over-capacity and the only way to keep order is with strict lock down type procedures. This is the system we have built in the United States. We have created a mental health/ drug treatment system disguised as a homeless system.
We need a safe space for those experiencing homelessness to come to relax, listen and talk about the issues they are facing. We need alumni to come back and be willing to provide some advice to their peers. We need the people who oversee local homeless funding to come to the space as guests and hear from those struggling with housing about the messy system they have created. Those without housing need to push community leaders to make changes in a timely manner and then come back to show that these changes are in the works. The unhoused need help with the mundane like cutting through the bureaucracy of getting ID to the major undertakings of getting a crime from 12 years ago expunged from their record. They need government to get their boots off their necks and not be so tied to the sacred property rights of abandoned housing/warehouses/land. They need landlords, employers, health care professionals to forgive and see every person entering the office for their humanity and not their past mistakes or solely their economic status in society. If we provided safe spaces, leaders would emerge to push good ideas to provide affordable housing to the masses. A million good ideas would bloom. Some would work and some would fail, but in the end fewer people would give up and sleep on the nation’s sidewalk.
The horrific story of the Bronx Parent Housing Network presented in the New York Times recently points to the need for those experiencing homelessness to be more involved in the governance, oversight and distribution of homeless dollars in every city in the United States. Staff and Board of the National Coalition wish to express our deep and profound sadness that women were allegedly sexually abused at a publicly funded shelter in New York City, and condemn all abuse, especially when inflicted on those seeking help in traumatic times.
“It is shocking that the board of an agency serving abuse victims would not put in place strict protocols to protect those women from assaults while they are attempting to rebuild their lives. This agency is using taxpayer dollars to provide emergency housing, and these staff and residents faced some of the same misogynistic, controlling behavior they were fleeing. It points to a need for better oversight by both the local government as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the source of much of this funding,” said Donald Whitehead, executive director of NCH.
We believe that if people experiencing homeless were more involved in a meaningful way in the governance of the shelters in the United States, staff exploitation and harassment would be significantly decreased. Consumer feedback is a necessity in so many industries, why not in homeless or other social services? We at NCH have long advocated for both currently and formerly homeless folks to be employed with the task of collecting and reporting shelter concerns to community leaders.
The agency facing these disgusting allegations rose from a small organization only 5 years ago to a multi-million dollar operation, in response to the explosion of homelessness in NYC. We now spend billions of federal dollars to provide direly needed services to those experiencing homelessness across the country. Yet no city has instituted full oversight by people who have used these services. Unfortunately, people who are utilizing the services are not treated as equals to homeless services providers, Continuum of Care funding boards or in the oversight of the shelters.
This is not an isolated incident in New York City. We have documented media accounts of exploitation and harassment at shelters in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Florida, and Washington, DC. But there are many examples of homeless led organizations that could be tapped by HUD and local communities to provide oversight of homeless services. San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness has the most advanced Shelter Monitoring Committee which could be modelled around the country. Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Portland and Philadelphia all have the infrastructure in place to take a leadership role in monitoring and providing peer support.
We must more fully integrate those experiencing homelessness into reforming our systems. NCH demands that:
