Social worker Krystal Koop talked with me about her lived experience of homelessness as a young teenager, her work in homelessness, harm reduction, and criminal justice. Krystal helped start the University District Street Medicine Project (UDSM), a University of Washington interprofessional student-run organization that still operates today (and for which I am a huge fan and faculty preceptor). This conversation occurred in the summer of 2015. Today, Krystal Koop works as a grief counselor. She talks about her first-hand experiences trying to work within broken systems, including child protective services, behavioral health, and the carceral system (and our continued and increasing criminalization of homelessness). She speaks to the importance of working with people currently or formally experiencing various forms of homelessness, with community-based frontline service providers, and providing interprofessional “learning by doing” opportunities for our health science students. This interview mentions the nurse-led Housing Health Outreach Team (HHOT) and the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s housing first 1811 Eastlake, among other Seattle service providers.
Dr. Michael Copass, Seattle native, neurologist, Vietnam Army veteran/physician, and long-time head of the Harborview Medical Center’s Emergency Department, is a living legend in the Seattle area and in emergency medicine in our country. On July 26, 2015, I traveled to Sequim, Washington, to the home of Dr. Copass. Harborview physician Dr. David Carlbom and his wife, Dr. Judith Rayl (a retired physician and abstract photographer), accompanied me. I recorded this interview with Dr. Copass and his wife, Lucy, at their kitchen table. He spoke about his philosophy of care (“everyone is a gold coin”; about how the Seattle of the 1970s (as, perhaps, now) had “no organized plan for dealing with sadness”; about the creation of Harborview’s pioneering sexual assault center in 1972 by social worker Lucy Berliner, saying she did this by “churning through masculine indifference”; about the creation of King County’s stellar Medic One system of pre-hospital emergency care; about many other aspects of his long professional medical career.
I first worked with Casey Trupin soon after I moved to Seattle almost thirty-two years ago. At the time, I was working on applied policy research on improving access to health care for teens and young adults experiencing homelessness (while working as a nurse practitioner providing primary health care at a Seattle clinic specifically for our houseless young people). Along with Seattle and King County Department of Health Health Care for the Homeless, Casey and I worked on a project to clearly interpret Washington State laws impacting what types of health care could be provided to teenagers without necessitating the legal consent of parents/guardians–a source of confusion for teens and healthcare providers and a major barrier to care. I think this was when Casey was a recent law school graduate. I’ve followed his amazing work over the decades and was glad to talk with him recently about his work.
As he points out in this conversation, preventing youth homelessness is one of the best ways to prevent adult and chronic homelessness. A recent report from the Office of Homeless Youth for Washington shows that a concerted effort by multiple agencies and people (including young people with the lived experience of homelessness) reduced homelessness among young people ages 12-24 in Washington by 40% (between 2016 and 2022). Proving that it can be done.
On March 8, 2024, I sat down with Tamara Bauman to discuss her work, experiences, and perspectives on homelessness, domestic violence, and frontline staff burnout.
This project received funding support from a 4Culture Heritage Award, a Jack Straw Cultural Center Artist Award, and a Humanities Washington Stories Fund award. I want to thank these important arts and culture agencies and all the people who have talked with me about their work.
Yesterday, at a community homelessness resource and health fair where I was faculty preceptor for a footcare clinic with some of our medical and nursing students, I was reminded of the powerful role of libraries in the lives of people experiencing homelessness. Among the tables and tents offering warm winter coats, gloves, hats, behavioral health resources, pizza, bagels, coffee, haircuts, youth shelter and women’s day shelter services, and our footcare, the University Branch of the Seattle Public Library table was quite popular. Amidst the absurdity of a return to backward-looking book bans throughout our country and in a season of thanksgiving, let us remember that public libraries literally save lives.
It is not hyperbole to say that public libraries save lives, especially for people experiencing homelessness. Libraries give sanctuary and shelter, both emotionally and physically. Libraries yield quiet, peacefulness, community, heat, and, hopefully, air conditioning when it’s hot and smokey outside. Libraries have public restrooms, which are surprisingly scarce in Seattle as in most US cities. Harried parents can find respite in libraries with their bright, colorful children’s book sections, free access to the internet and computers, and children’s story hours. Children, teens, adults, and older adults, no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, differing abilities, socio-economic and housing situations, can all find stories of people like them who deal with challenges they face and who find ways to not only survive, but endure, resist, and thrive.
If you are fortunate enough to be comfortably and stably housed, please remember that not all of our community members have these basic necessities. When visiting public libraries, try to practice tolerance for all people who seem different to you. That extends to people who ‘appear’ to be experiencing homelessness.
A growing number of public libraries throughout our country and internationally are hiring social workers to assist library patrons from all walks of life to access needed health and social support. Whole Person Librarianship is a library-social work collaboration hub with resources and a map of social work-supported libraries. A recent and excellent book is Libraries and Homelessness: An Action Guide by the librarian and homelessness advocate Julie Ann Winkelstein–available, of course, in many public libraries.
I’m honored to be in such good company. I am taking my workshop, The Meaning of Home, on the road throughout Washington State in 2024-2025. If you/your library or other group wants to book me for this in-person or virtual workshop, contact Sarah Faulkner (see below for her e-mail address).
In winding down an academic career in anticipation of having more uninterrupted time for my writing and advocacy work on homelessness, I’m faced with what to do with the boxes and piles of research materials, field notes, correspondence, and my ‘digital assets,’ including this personal website and my digital storytelling videos. And then there are the hundreds of personal journals I have kept since I was eleven. What to do with all this stuff?
I have worked at a public university for the past thirty years, during which I have researched and written four nonfiction books on various aspects of homelessness. My relationships with university librarians in support of this work have been collegial, mutually respectful, and rewarding. So when university archive librarians asked me to consider donating my research materials, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. Here is where I can donate ‘all this stuff!’ But wait. It’s not as simple as boxing it all up and sending it to them as if it was used clothing.
The university archive librarians are walking me through the process of sorting, organizing, and inventorying all of the materials I plan to donate. Since I do not have any university research colleagues who have gone through this process, I turned to my author colleagues through my membership in the Authors Guild. On the guild’s community forum, I posted a question as to advice and resources on donating author materials to a university archive. I’ll summarize some of the best replies but without specific attribution.
Think through what materials you want to maintain access to for current and future work. Decide on copyright transfer and how open or closed (restricted) you want the collection to be. Public universities like the one I work for want archived materials to be as widely accessible as possible. They do allow restrictions (like length of time until they are open) on sensitive materials such as personal journals.
Some authors donating their materials to university archives are so embarrassed by earlier work (like for their MFA degrees) that they destroy those writings. Other authors consider the inclusion of earlier, perhaps messier and less mature writings as an honest part of their writing life and include them in their archive donations.
Allow more time than you think it may take and try to work closely with a university archive librarian throughout the process.
An advantage of donating one’s research and writing materials while still relatively healthy is the peace of mind (not to mention a less cluttered living space). And, knowing that we won’t be burdening our family members with deciding what to do with all the boxes of detritus after we die.
The point of an archive is that you have material that is of interest and help to future researchers. It is based on the quality of your materials and not on how famous you are or may become.
Encampment in U District Park, 2021, photo credit: Josephine Ensign
The lived experience, the direct and unintentional (as in not stunt journalism) experience of homelessness, is increasingly used and prioritized in policy and program realms. While much of this is good, I think it needs to be examined more closely.
As someone with the lived experience of homelessness when I was a young adult in my then hometown of Richmond, Virginia, it is a concept that I wrestle with. What counts as lived experience, who decides what counts, and is lived experience something that automatically turns people into, as referred to by Pathway UK, experts by experience?
I find it encouraging that there is a growing understanding of the importance of people with the lived experience of homelessness needing to be included in real, not token, ways for more effective program planning and policy-making. An example of this locally is Marc Dones, a Black non-binary person with the lived experience of homelessness and mental illness (bipolar disorder), who was named the first director of the King County Homelessness Regional Authority. This week Marc announced that he is leaving his position. People with the lived experience of homelessness have long been employed as outreach workers, but not many have become leaders like Marc and Derrick Belgarde, an Indigenous man, and CEO of the Chief Seattle Club. Representation and visibility matter. They matter in terms of informing better programs and policies. They matter in terms of countering negative stereotyping and social exclusionary practices of people experiencing, or having experienced, homelessness.
A recurring issue in terms of people with the lived experience of homelessness working in some aspect of homelessness, especially in direct service work, is the danger of being retriggered, relapsing if clean and sober, not maintaining professional boundaries, and burning out. In trauma work, there is the phenomenon of trauma mastery, of a person being drawn to working with people in difficult situations similar to those they experienced and felt powerless to control. In trauma mastery, people, frequently unconsciously, return to sites of trauma wanting to ‘do it right’ this time, to have control and mastery of the situation. Too often, this sets people up for unreasonable expectations of themselves, co-workers, and their clients. As Jenn Adams, who works with vehicle residency outreach programs, told me, it takes years of support and even therapy to gain perspective on one’s own experience of homelessness. She points to mentors and work supervisors who check in with her, identify possible triggering situations, and help her maintain healthy boundaries in her direct service work.
In my discussion with Derrick Belgarde about the increased focus on people with the lived experience of homelessness, he said, “I’m a firm believer that lived experience should always lead in any field…The best ones are ones who can actually relate.” He followed this by talking about the fact that there is a spectrum of different types of homelessness that people experience. He says of these experiences, “They’re all traumatic and horrible and awful, but they’re all totally different, and I’m only an expert in one.” He added, “There needs to be more diversity in these decision-makings because they don’t think about that. I see a lot of the lived experience movement making grounds in homelessness work today, but a lot of them, I don’t think, come from the type of homelessness we’re trying to solve in the downtown core.”
The 2022 National Health Care for the Homeless Conference and Policy Symposium, billed as being held in Seattle and in-person for the first time since the pandemic, was held in the swanky Hyatt Regency Bellevue near a high-end shopping center at the beginning of May. The venue was ironic given the fact that Bellevue officials work hard, mainly through more aggressive policing and criminalization of homelessness, to keep the city sanitized, especially compared with Seattle.
I attended the conference and spoke with David Peery, a Miami, Florida, Black lawyer with the lived experience of homelessness during the Great Recession. David is the current co-chair of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council’s National Consumer Advisory Board (NCAB). I asked him if the NCAB folks have conversations about what ‘counts’ as someone with the lived experience of homelessness. He said that they follow a guideline of recent experience of homelessness within the last five years or longer ago if the person has stayed involved in direct homeless service provision, like being a peer outreach worker or in policy and advocacy work on homelessness. “A lot of times people who were homeless become judgmental about currently homeless people–unless they understand trauma-informed care,” he explained.
So while the lived experience of homelessness in homeless policy-making and programming is important, it should be more carefully examined and understood.
Although I love words and writing, there are many times when visual information is more effective at conveying complex ideas, facts, and emotions. That is why, for many years now, I have created digital storytelling videos about health and homelessness in Seattle. I use these videos in teaching and in my public scholarship. Recently, in a Stories-in-Motion online course I am taking through the StoryCenter, I created this StoryMap (free version for frugality and simplicity), “Skid Road: Stories of Homelessness in Seattle.” It is a work in progress (isn’t everything?), meaning I will add to it over time. It also happens to be more personal, weaving my story into the bigger story of homelessness in Seattle.
