Neighborhood Partnerships

Bridges to Housing continues to serve homeless families throughout the Portland metropolitan area.  Neighborhood Partnerships is pleased to report on an exciting offshoot of this innovative program.

Bridges to Housing included a substantial evaluation component, conducted by Portland State University’s Regional Research Institute.  Their latest evaluation report highlighted the impact of trauma on families in the program.  As PSU processed those findings with partners in the community, the group identified a promising area of practice and is now doing additional work in the community around trauma and homelessness.

National research indicates that most of us at some point have experienced a traumatic event—the death of a loved one, a car accident, divorce, violence, or other traumatic events. For homeless families or individuals, living on the street or in homeless shelters increases the likelihood of numerous traumatic incidents. Exposure to violence—either on the street or in an intimate relationship, cycles of housing instability, substance abuse and other problems are more prevalent among homeless families, and these events can become cycles of violence and trauma.

All too often, the residual impacts of this trauma, which might include an inability to form trusting relationships, to maintain appropriate boundaries and relationships, and seeking to regain power or control, can hinder a person’s ability to interact within our service systems. Families or people seeking services with histories of trauma can often be labeled as paranoid or non-compliant.

New research in the field has led to strategies and program design methods called “trauma informed services.” These methods and strategies seek to understand the trauma families have experienced, and to improve services within these five areas: safety of clients; trustworthiness; choice over services; collaboration with program staff and sharing control with families seeking services; and empowering people seeking services.

Now, the Regional Research Institute is partnering with two local agencies—Impact Northwest and Catholic Charities—to test how trauma informed services might be effective within a housing complex. This work will include assessments of the participating organization related to how well they already provide trauma informed services, and a support-group model for women who have histories of significant trauma. While Bridges to Housing families will not necessarily be directly impacted through this work, we are confident that both Bridges to Housing and the larger housing plus services system in Portland will benefit from this work.

We believe that this important work by the Regional Research Institute and its partners will mean that families can be served more effectively and efficiently, and will have better outcomes. We hope it will also mean that these families will also begin to heal from past trauma and therefore have a better future for themselves and their children. We here at Neighborhood Partnerships offer our congratulations and good wishes to the Regional Research Institute, Impact Northwest and Catholic Charities as they embark on this important work.

Earlier this month, Neighborhood Partnerships held the third session of the Advocacy College with Patrick Bresette of Demos and Larry Wallack of Portland State University. Thirty-five advocates joined the Advocacy College in September. We’ve learned some of the basics of framing and messaging, we’ve begun to digest Demos’ research on government and the economy, we’ve learned to use social math, and we now know that frames trump facts.

In the most recent session, in November, we talked about developing and using message boxes—a tool to help create, deliver and stay on message when talking to legislators, the media, and other audiences. During this conversation, our attention kept turning back to the looming state budget deficit, now projected at over $3.2 billion for 2011–2013. We assume that budget issues will dominate the conversation over the next several years. At the Advocacy College, we realized that our view of what Oregon needs isn’t being heard as part of the budget conversation. We want that to change.

We here at Neighborhood Partnerships have a vision of Oregon as a place which offers its diversity of residents opportunities to thrive, pathways out of poverty and disenfranchisement, and adequately supported public systems and structures as shared tools for these goals. We also believe that we are all in this together, and we all have a stake and a role in addressing the problems we’re facing. We’re not on our own and we will either succeed or fail at solving this budget crisis together. The good news is that we know how to solve these problems—we’ve had tough times before, and we’ve gotten through them. We also know that how we make decisions will impact how we recover from this recession. Now is the time to have the conversation about the state we want to live in.

We live in the wealthiest country in the world. We don’t need to ground our discourse in a false sense of scarcity and fear. Scarcity limits our ability to be creative and make choices about our future. Fear keeps us from seeing that we really are all in this together—that none of us is truly independent. We rely on each other every day, and we depend on the community systems and structures put in place by past generations to go about our lives and work and contribute to Oregon’s vitality.

Our government and each of us have a critical role to play as we work to solve the problems we’re facing. It will take hard work and good ideas to start solving these problems, and it’s time to start talking about the choices we need to make and the steps we need to take to be the kind of state we want to be. The decisions we make now, in this time and this recession and this budget year will impact how we recover from this recession and what kind of state we leave for our children. I believe that we want to leave them a state where there is enough to go around. A state that makes sure the least among us can have opportunities for a better future. The budget is a tool for building the future that we want—not an obstacle between us and our collective vision.

First things first—let’s agree that we’re all in this together, and start there. Next let’s understand that in this time when the state budget deficit is significant and real and looming, we need to put all of our options on the table—cutting the budget while protecting those hardest hit by the economic downturn, implementing new or raising existing taxes, and examining tax-side spending. So let’s start talking to our elected officials, and tell them that we want to have a conversation about our priorities and our future as a state.