Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind by Yvonne Vissing

Author:Yvonne Vissing [Vissing, Yvonne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813108728
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 1996-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

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Getting the Rural Homeless the Help They Need

It is difficult, if not impossible, to get homeless people in rural areas the help they need. Rural areas are poorer, have fewer professionals and services, and consist of residents who are more resistant to using formal organizations in times of crisis. Once homeless, families run into economic and bureaucratic mazes that are impossible to manuever. While help is “supposed” to be available, time and time again, rural families and children experience insurmountable barriers to receiving aid. Personal problems, economic distress, and a lack of affordable housing can be addressed when there is a human service delivery system that “works.” However, for many rural people who are at imminent risk of homelessness, the system just doesn’t work. My respondents learned that it was often a waste of time for them even to ask for help. As one mother reported, “there were always loopholes” that made her family ineligible for receiving aid. And when they did qualify, “it takes so long to get the help that you could die in the meantime,” one father told me.

A person needing services who is poorly educated, new to a community, disabled, or lacking in interpersonal skills will have difficulty successfully utilizing a fragmented human service system. It is convenient to blame the homeless for having personal characteristics that made them somehow at “fault” for not using the system “right.” But as a human service administrator with a postdoctoral degree, frequently I could not find information or resources that I thought “must” exist. There is no central depository of information about all of the programs that one might use; there is no uniform qualification criteria for accessing services; there is no single place or person to go to in order to find out the whats, hows, whens, and wheres of the service delivery system. This is true for professionals and recipients alike. So while the homeless sometimes do not know how to find the help they need through the web of services that could benefit them, not accessing resources was more a matter of system failure than personal failure.

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