Outcomes or Have We Made a Difference?
Sarah Toohey, Manager, Policy and Communications, Council to Homeless Persons
In his book Death Sentence, Don Watson demolishes the managerial use of language. He argues that this new bureaucratic writing style deadens us to the real meaning behind our words. He particularly doesnot like the term ‘outcomes’.
In the human services ‘outcomes’ are very fashionable right now. We want to focus less on outputs and more on outcomes, but it’s not always altogether clear what those outcomes are. In practice we are simply talking about whether or not any particular intervention has made someone’s life better.For homelessness services,the measure of ‘better’ is whether we’ve helped someone get a home, or helped them keep it.
Last year CHP held consultations with 115 people from 80 services to talk about ‘outcomes’and the future of the homelessness services system in Victoria. Overwhelmingly people were making a difference, engaging in meaningful relationships, knitting together scarce resources and navigating bureaucracy to connect people to the services they need. Yet they simply did not have the tools to help deliver the ‘outcomes’ of getting housing and keeping a home.
The service system is not designed to meet these needs. Support periods are too rigid, brokerage is too limited in funding and scope, eligibility is too tightly targeted, there simply is notenough social housingand private rents are too high.
To end homelessness, workers in Specialist Homelessness Services need a toolkit they can draw onto meet the needs of people who are at risk of or experiencing homelessness.
These are things like a service system that’s visible and easily accessible at the first sign of housing trouble;enough brokerage funds and skills to help stabilise a tenancy where it can be saved and emergency and crisis accommodation options where it cannot.
A toolkit to end homelessness would include a suite of housing and support options, like rapid rehousing to help people access the private rental market quickly and help them sustain that tenancy, or permanent supportive housing for people who need long term assistance.
Importantly it includes mobilising mainstream services to identify and assist people at risk of homelessness. At its most acute this means hospitals recording housing situation at dischargeto make it clearer when people are being discharged from hospital into homelessness. It would mean all young people leaving state care have a housing plan, and the financial resources to sustain it.It would mean that people don’texit prison into precarious housing. But all of those things can only happen if homelessness services have access to affordable housing, and the flexibility to support people for as long, or as short a time, as they need it.
None of these ideas are particularly new. The 2008 White Paper The road home, outlined how we need to ‘break the cycle and ‘turn off the tap’ of homelessness by providing long-term housing and support and engaging mainstream services. Some innovative projects were funded and some of the service elements outlined above are operating in the current system; but only for some groups of people, in some places, in some projects. The next steprequires effort and cooperation between both levels of government. The next step is to ensure that these service elements are spread evenly to meet demonstrated need, and interlinked to form a service system designed to end homelessness.
In Victoria at least we need to provide workers in the Specialist Homelessness Services with the additional tools they need to navigate the complex terrain of homeless and get results (or outcomes if you prefer that sort of thing).