What is Homelessness?
Hello, Fellow Traveler, welcome to our starting point. Thank you for coming. I am so glad you are here.
You did a great job packing your bag.
Are you ready to begin our journey?
At this first trailhead we will investigate the question,
“What is homelessness?”
We will:
- Explore our own preconceptions about homelessness
- Discover the educational definition
- Consider what areas of our core beliefs we may want to revise with our new experience and learning
Let’s start with a gentle acknowledgement of what our current beliefs are.
To situate our understanding of what homelessness is in our current mental image, we begin by summoning an image of what home is to us.
Pause, Reflect, Write
Look within yourself and seek home there. The core belief. The archetype of home.
What does home look like? What does home smell like. What does home feel like?
Is home warm? Is home safe? Is home tangible? Is home clean? Is home welcoming?
More Knowledge
“Home is an ambiguous concept but is generally recognised to carry meanings on social, emotional and material levels (Parsell 2012). There is broad consensus that when home is experienced positively, it is not simply a physical structure but rather a safe and secure place where people feel autonomy, control and a sense of privacy and comfort; home is also a space that provides a source of identity and belonging (Leith 2006; Mallett 2004;Manzo2003; Moore 2007; Somerville 1992).” (Mayock & Parker, 2021)
Are there smells of home cooking?
Are there soft blankets on the clean beds?
Are there gentle voices and soft arms to hold and comfort?
Is there laughter after hearty meals?
Is it fixed to a place?
A street?
A town?
A city?
A state?
Are your clothes in drawers or suitcases or plastic bags?
Do you have a bed or a cot or a couch or a sleeping bag?
Do you have a desk or a table or a shelf for your things?
Are there parents caring for children?
Are there gentle and safe hands?
Warm hugs?
Safe beds?
What feelings do you associate with home?
Safety? Security? Acceptance? Love?
We all have different somatic response to the idea of home.
What is your body telling you?
Do you feel safe? Comforted? Anxious? Relaxed? Afraid? Cozy?
When you have the feeling in your body of home, notice where it lives in you.
Where do you experience that feeling?
Is it a welcome feeling? Is it unwelcome?
You may like to take a moment to write down any words, thoughts, or images that arise.
Take a few moments to ground yourself and, when you are ready, we will step back onto the trail.
When you completed the reflection, what came up for you?
Our ACES contribute to our core beliefs about home.
If you had a home that left you ACE free, you may think of home as someplace you can always go back to, a happy place, a constant.
If you experienced home and your homelife as a place to be overcome, you may interpret concepts of homelessness differently than a person who had a happy home.
There is no right or wrong to how your experience contributed to your meaning making. What matters here is that you look inward so you can then look outward.
Through this journey in mindfulness, we can explore the connections safely together.
How we experienced home formed our brain, beliefs, and identity.
Our experiences influence our beliefs about homelessness.
It can affect whether we see home as vital, or less important, to a person’s existence.
We may believe home is a safe haven where we were always loved, protected, and received.
Or, we may experience home on a somatic level, our body level, as dangerous or threatening.
Or, we might not even think about it. We may be high up on the ladder of inference, stuck in a reflexive loop without even realizing it.
This is the invitation to gather new data and stay low on the ladder of inference while we explore our current level of empathy, our compassionate understanding of our own experiences.
Then we can imagine the experiences of homeless youth and their families from a place of self-awareness and authenticity.
For individuals experiencing homelessness,
there is no home.
There is fear.
There is cold.
There is shame.
There is hunger.
These are the four walls of homelessness.
The more ACES you have, the more your understanding of home may be influenced by those traumas.
Please be gentle with yourself. If this reflection is activating, please go slowly.
Pause, Reflect, Write
Picture home again in your minds eye and breath into that idea.
Notice how your body feels.
Notice how your breath responds.
Does anything surprise you?
Comfort you?
Frighten you?
Now imagine homelessness.
Sit with that idea for a moment.
What images come to mind?
What words, statements, or assumptions come up?
Don’t worry.
You are safe.
No one is judging you here.
We are together on this path.
Our core beliefs are not our fault.
There is no need for shame or judgment.
Our core beliefs are our responsibility.
They are ours to revise and construct through mindfulness and self-reflection.
Pause, Breathe, and Look Within
Sit for a moment with your beliefs about what homelessness is.
Do you imagine an underpass with tents?
A car overflowing with plastic bags?
A park bench with a dirty sleeping bag?
A cardboard box in an alley?
A choice?
A trauma?
A cycle?
A destiny?
A social dilemma?
A lifestyle?
A failing?
A crime?
Do you imagine families?
Do you see children?
Do you picture couches or mattresses laying on floors?
Do you see park bushes or concrete river beds?
Whatever your image, this is merely our beginning.
We will explore this idea, and we may choose to transform it, whatever our starting point.
There is no wrong answer here.
Only gentle self-reflection.
It may be useful to draw a picture or write some notes about what you see, think, and feel.
Now that we have a mental and emotional image of how we imagine homelessness, let’s unpack a data driven definition to compare our thoughts to.
Homelessness is a diverse experience
In Homelessness Comes to School by Joseph Murphy and Kerri Tobin, the authors explain the complexity of the definition.
Depending on who defines the term, their discipline, area of research, or government agency, the definition can vary significantly.
According to Murphy and Tobin, the definitions are an area of contentious debate.
Debate, however, is disconnection which won’t serve us here.
Our purpose is understanding and exploration, and therefore, we will forgo the minutiae of the theoretical debates and focus our attention on the concept of not having the shelter of four walls to call our own. No door to lock. No key to keep on our keyring.
We acknowledge here that many of us traveling on this journey together to explore the homelessness of others have been unhoused and unhomed in a variety of ways ourselves. It may make this part of the trek tiring and we may need extra rest along the way.
For our empirical definition of homelessness we will use the one that relates to us as educators. This definition comes from the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.
The Educational Definition
According to the National Center for Homeless Education, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act authorizes the federal Education for Homeless Children and Youth (EHCY) Program and is the primary piece of federal legislation related to the education of children and youth experiencing homelessness. It was reauthorized in December 2015 by Title IX, Part A, of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)
Subtitle VII-B of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (per Title IX, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act) defines homeless as follows:
The term “homeless children and youths”–
(A) means individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence (within the meaning of section 103(a)(1));
and
(B) includes –
(i) children and youths who are sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason; are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations; are living in emergency or transitional shelters; or are abandoned in hospitals;*
(ii) children and youths who have a primary nighttime residence that is a public or private place not designed for or ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings (within the meaning of section 103(a)(2)(C));
(iii) children and youths who are living in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations, or similar settings; and
(iv) migratory children (as such term is defined in section 1309 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) who qualify as homeless for the purposes of this subtitle because the children are living in circumstances described in clauses (i) through (iii).
Variations on a Theme
In Serving Students Who Are Homeless, Ronald E. Hallett and Linda Skrla unpack the homeless experience to “help broaden notions of homelessness…” “Students,” they explain, “often experience multiple forms of homelessness and tend to endure more than one episode of residential instability.” (p. 47)
While the definition of homeless may be under debate in the literature and among government agencies, theorists agree that no two students experience the challenges of homelessness in the exact same way.
Hallett and Skrla quote Canfield and Teasley (2015) as saying that what a student “need[s] to be successful academically is tied to the unique factors inherent in each experience of homelessness. For example, some children might not have access to computers to complete certain assignments in class, or a homeless child may not have adequate lighting or space to complete homework” (p 69) (p 47).
Pause, Breathe, and Look Within
Let’s pause for a moment and breath.
Inhale peace.
Exhale fear.
Let us sit for a moment with the definition we have developed thus far.
Is there anything that was surprising?
Is there anything which disrupted the initial concept we imagined?
Is there anything that created dissonance?
It is very common to imagine homelessness as an easily observable plight. We may imagine cardboard signs and unkempt hair.
We may think first of the Skid Row character we have seen in contemporary musicals.
Abandoned in hospitals, migratory workers, living doubled up, how do these experiences integrate with our starting concepts?
Around this bend we will look out at the landscape of homelessness in its many forms.
Given the difficulty of isolating any one experience of homelessness, we must look a bit deeper into some of the “subcategories of homelessness that young people may experience while navigating the school system” (Hallett and Skrla 2017, p 48)
Living in a Shelter
“Shelter is a temporary place to sleep indoors. It is, for many, a stabilizing step along the path to permanent housing. Those living in shelters are still unhoused. Shelters typically do not provide all the functionality of a home; those living in standalone shelters do not have access to cooking facilities, restrooms within their living space, or plumbing.” (Diane, 2021)
Families on the Streets with Disconnected Youth
Disconnected from school and social services, these youth under the age of 18 can be living alone or with family in “a car, abandoned building, campsite, or place not suitable for nighttime residence.”
These students are not often in school.
Hotels/Motels Living
Living in a hotel or motel because families can’t afford the costs of living in a home or apartment is another type of homelessness.
“‘Welfare hotels’ involve subpar living conditions, including public bathrooms shared by multiple tenants and no access to a kitchen. Each room may have in excess of five people sharing a space designated for one person.”
Couchsurfing
Sleeping on a friend’s or family member’s couch or floor, couchsurfing youth do not have personal spaces to keep their clothes, school books, or personal belongings. There is a constant sense of relying on the good will of others and youth move from place to place frequently. “Securing a place to sleep each night takes a great deal of time and energy away from educational engagement.”
Living Doubled-Up
“Families sharing space with another family as a result of economic hardship. The crowded environment only afford a semi-stable situation; if there is a dispute or one family experiences a financial crisis, all residents potentially end up without a home. These residences may have in excess of two families sharing space typically designed for one family.”
Living on the Streets
Sleeping outside in bank lobbies, at bus stops, behind dumpsters, and under bridges, street life is potentially the most dangerous way to be homeless.
These are situations where youth are sleeping in “high-risk, nontraditional locations, such as under bridges, in bus stations, on park benches, or in abandoned buildings or other public spaces.”
Migratory Life
Migrant workers move with seasonal crops from location to location living in bunk houses, in trailers, and farm provided lodging.
While these young people experience a variety of the above situations it is helpful to identify this group as unique in that our system of food production in America depends on their willing homelessness to provide our economy with affordable groceries.
Pause, Breathe, and Look Within
Let’s allow these expanded definitions to resonate with us for a moment.
Is there any internal resistance to our definition?
Homelessness is the experience of humanity without the shelter of a home.
How does that definition sit inside of us?
Homelessness is being a snail without a shell, vulnerable and at risk.
Where do you experience that idea in your body?
Can you imagine being that vulnerable?
I was homelessness as a single mother in graduate school for about six months. During that time my three-year-old son and I lived doubled-up, in a motel, on friends floors and couches, and then doubled-up again until I began full-time employment leaving my schooling incomplete.
Have you or someone close to you lived through this story as well?
Can you relate from first-hand knowledge?
What comes up for you when you think about the different types of homelessness that people, parents, students, and families can experience?
We named four walls of homelessness: fear, cold, shame, and hunger.
We will come to the trailhead of each to explore fully the ways these experiences might impact the students we serve.
We will learn how the experience of homelessness is often preceded by trauma and is traumatic in it’s own right.
We will map the ACES that are the constant companion of individuals who have no homes.
We walked boldly through this terrain and we are approaching the next leg of our journey.
We have defined homelessness as the lack of four walls, a door, and a key. We have identified key ways of experiencing homelessness including shelter living, living as a family or alone in an unsuitable nighttime residence, couch surfing, living doubled up, migratory living, motel living, and living on the street.
Now we have completed this path and are ready to move to the next trailhead where we will look at who experiences homelessness.
Pause, Breathe, and Look Within
Well done on this leg of the journey.
Let’s rest here for a moment together.
Breath. Relax your body.
This is hard work. This is important work.
You are good at this.