Kristen Nolen: 8 Lessons I've Learned in my 8 Years at Miriam's House
Kristen joined the Miriam’s House team in March 2013, bringing with her extensive experience in social work, advocacy, and policy work. As the Director of Housing Services at Miriam’s House, her passion for our vulnerable neighbors and her commitment to provide the very best homeless services is unparalleled. Due to her efforts, in her 8 years here at Miriam’s House, thousands of lives have been changed and many families have been returned to the dignity of a home.
We asked Kristen to share 8 things she’s learned about homelessness in her 8 years working in this field:
Housing is the foundation for good health, education, safety and opportunity
Most are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and the work we do every day bears this out. When people do not have their most basic needs met, like shelter and food, it is difficult to think beyond day-to-day survival. With the safety and security of a home, people can focus on their longer-term goals and meeting other needs like their mental and physical health, going to school, training for a career, and being a good parent and neighbor.
Evidence shows that stable housing in safe, low-poverty neighborhoods sometimes is the best medicine. This became even more evident during the pandemic, when the prescription for staying safe was staying at home. The Center for Disease Control states people experiencing homelessness are at much greater risk of infectious and chronic illnesses. In fact, evidence shows that people who are homeless die an average 12 years sooner than the general U.S. population.
Stable housing has also been shown to lead to better school performance and higher academic achievement among children. Homeless students are more likely to be absent, to fall behind in core subjects, and to drop out. We serve over a hundred homeless children every year because we believe every child deserves the opportunities a stable home provides.
Homelessness is the result of system failures, not individual flaws
A variety of structural factors contribute to the existence of homelessness including a severe shortage of affordable housing, a lack of living wage jobs, inadequate mental health resources, high incarceration rates with minimal re-entry supports, and racial inequalities in wealth accumulation. Our society often takes a “blame the victim” stance in regard to homelessness, looking for individual faults to explain why someone is unhoused. While this might be a convenient way to avoid accountability, the truth is that homelessness is not a given or inherent condition. Many housed people drink alcohol, abuse substances, ignore their mental health, or have poor budgeting skills but the vast majority of them don’t become homeless. On the other hand, for people living in poverty, one crisis such as a medical emergency or the loss of a job can cause them to lose their housing. To truly end homelessness, we need to focus on creating policies and systems that ensure that all people have access to housing that they can afford.
The problem of homelessness is evolving and so, too, must our solutions
In my eight years at Miriam’s House, we have remained steadfast to our founding mission of ending homelessness, while recognizing that we must grow and adapt to meet changing needs. From 2010 until today, we have expanded our capacity to serve 700% more people per year by adding innovative programs. While family homelessness continues to be a primary focus, we have added new programs that serve other vulnerable populations as well. In 2017, we noticed that the number of young people becoming homeless was steadily rising. Often, this population has particular risk factors like being exploited or victimized because of their lack of housing. It is estimated that 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ and have been rejected by their families. We designed a youth housing program to respond to this unaddressed need. Similarly, in 2018, we added a street outreach program called Homeless Outreach & Mobile Engagement (HOME) to attend specifically to the acute needs of the unsheltered population—people sleeping outdoors, under bridges, in abandoned buildings, or in vehicles. These neighbors are often the hardest to reach and serve, traditionally falling through the cracks of most systems. In the last three years, HOME has served 164 unsheltered people, who otherwise would not have been connected to critically needed services and housing opportunities.
Losing your home is a traumatic event, often resulting from an accumulation of other traumatic events.
We recognize that homelessness in itself is a traumatic experience and that prior trauma, such as adverse childhood events, is likely to generate higher rates of homelessness. During an eviction or housing crisis, our clients lose not only their belongings but their sense of security, predictability and control. During a homeless episode, they may face re-traumatization through unsafe conditions or being the victim of a crime. With this understanding in mind, we have designed our programs to be trauma-informed, with an awareness of how trauma impacts our clients’ coping strategies and responses to stress. Services are aimed at promoting resiliency and feelings of safety for our clients.
There is no person who can’t be housed and the solution to homelessness is housing
The very foundation of our work at Miriam’s House is the conviction that housing is a human right, not a privilege to be earned. Our services prioritize those with the highest barriers and the most acute needs— vulnerable neighbors that many people think will never be housed. Sometimes I get asked if people choose to be homeless. In my experience, even those people who seem unwilling or unable to accept help usually have not been offered choices that truly meet their needs or are on their terms.
Last summer, we housed George, who had been living outside for over a decade. Our street outreach worker began visiting him at his tent, bringing him food, water, hygiene products and other supplies. By building a trusting relationship, we were then able to connect George with medical care, benefits and an apartment of his very own! He signed his lease on one of the hottest days of the summer, and he told us he couldn’t wait to take a shower, sleep in his own bed, and have air conditioning! Because we offered George his own lease in an apartment of his choosing, and not just a temporary fix, he was willing to come inside.
Harm reduction works
Every person engages in risky behaviors of some kind—getting behind the wheel of a car, swimming in the ocean, eating fried foods, or going snowboarding. And there are things we do, like wearing a seatbelt, to mitigate these risks. This same principle applies to the harm-reduction approach we use in our programs when working with clients who suffer from substance use disorders or severe mental illness.
Requiring abstinence from substances or compliance with mental health treatment as a precondition for housing results in people cycling through the homeless response system, hospitals, and jails over and over. At Miriam’s House, we believe that when people are able to stay housed and access the supports they need, they can work toward recovery goals, even intermittent ones like reducing their use if they aren’t yet ready to stop.
The focus of our harm-reduction approach is on reducing the potential negative consequences of risky behaviors, such as overdose for someone who uses substances. Harm reduction neither condones nor condemns any behavior but attempts to reduce harm resulting from that behavior. Harm-reduction practice honors clients’ dignity and autonomy by supporting them wherever they are in their motivation to make behavioral changes and offering them education on safer practices if they so choose. The harm-reduction philosophy embraces respect, trust, and a nonjudgmental approach as the key components of the helping relationship. We assume that our clients want to make positive changes in their lives, and our case managers use motivational strategies to help them make progress toward those goals.
Pairing wrap-around services with housing ensures long-term stability
We know that having individualized services and connections to community resources helps people maintain their housing long-term. Our case managers engage with a robust network of partners to provide wrap-around supports tailored to each client’s experience, with clients making the decisions about what they want and need. We believe that clients are the experts on their own lives, and we honor their choices about what services would best support them. This requires us to be knowledgeable about what resources exist in the community so that we can empower our clients with the full array of service options available to them.
Ending homelessness is possible through strategic collaboration
No single agency or organization can end homelessness alone. That’s why we lead the Central Virginia Continuum of Care—a coalition of partners all working closely together to solve this complex problem. With these partners, we collectively identify needs, share data, track trends, evaluate outcomes, and align our resources to drive down our community’s homeless numbers. Through strategic and targeted action, we have seen an 80% reduction in the number of people experiencing homelessness on any given night from 2015 to now. This collaborative work is intentional, data-informed, and guided by our community’s Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness.
An example of how this kind of intensive collaboration works is our weekly Veteran Huddles. We bring together partners like the Salem VA Medical Center, the Lynchburg Area Veterans Council and housing providers to work on housing plans for each and every homeless veteran. This resulted in our community reaching the benchmark of functional zero for homeless veterans, which means we demonstrated that we have the resources and capacity to house every veteran that experiences homelessness in less than 30 days.