Our Philosophy of Care

If you’re around homeless services for very long, you quickly realize that the homeless need more than services. Those impacted by homelessness need acknowledgement, friendship, dignity, and a voice in their own paths. They need a trauma-informed environment that can absorb, alleviate and accompany over the long haul.

They need a community that’s not just merciful, but restorative.

With our many friends and partners, we’ve come to understand some groundwork principles:

  1. Poverty is far more than a lack of material resources, or a lack of access to services. It is a lack of agency for oneself, in all the physical, economic, emotional, social and spiritual dimensions of that.

  2. Deficiency-oriented social services models have a hole in them. When we focus solely on poverty as material lack, we can unintentionally reinforce a cycle of habitual need without ever effectively addressing the absence of personal agency.

  3. A holistic social services model must be assets-oriented. It meets urgent material needs, but it also intentionally values the skills, knowledge and experiences of each individual and creates avenues to leverage those assets into agency.

  4. Holistic poverty reversal takes time. Cycles of impoverishment become deeply ingrained, and only sustained, long-term support of trusted friends and environments can provide the encouragement and constant resilience needed. This is doubly true for heavily traumatized populations like those experiencing homelessness.

Resources, employment, personal growth: The interdependent gears that drive the vision.

So how do you tackle the complex problems of homelessness, addiction, trauma and mental-health struggles? There are a lot of different moving parts to that question, and one approach is to let some of those moving parts drive each other.

Our partners at Dignity Health and Sutter Health are helping us continue to develop a multi-tiered strategy around the concept of Restorative Community:

  • Food and Resource Services - meeting critical needs for nutrition, clothing, hygiene, laundry, and housing referral, through a variety of outlets. These basic services create relationships and open access pathways for housing, health, and sustainable employment.

  • Life-Skills Programming for those exiting homelessness and recovering from trauma, group support and one-on-one coaching via the School for Recovery at the Recovery Cafe address topics such as personal finances, time management, self-care, health and fitness, and more.

  • Job-Skills Training through our Jobs & Mentoring (JAM) Academy, in which we hire individuals with lived homelessness experience and trauma, and use their skills and knowledge to deliver food and resource services, shape the life-skills programming, and bring perspective and ground-level ownership to programs like the Recovery Cafe. JAM Academy employees meet weekly with mentors who work on personal goals, with the opportunity to move into peer mentorship roles themselves by the time they graduate Level 3.

Taken as a whole, the interdependent components of the Restorative Community model become replicable in a variety of contexts.