At Family
Promise, a national nonprofit that serves homeless families, part of their
mantra is “once a Family Promise family, always a Family Promise family.”
Family Promise helps families with the wide-ranging problems that caused their
homelessness; everything from job training and financial literacy coaching, to
help finding child care and resources for health and mental health are included
in case management. Families stay with case management until they have met
their goals — even when they are no longer homeless.
Some people
ask why resources extend beyond the incident of homelessness. The answer is
simple. Family Promise serves people, not “the homeless.” Each family, and
every individual within the family, arrives with a specific set of needs that
deserve individual and personalized attention. They are not the homeless.
Homelessness is an experience that a family is having, not a defining feature
of their personhood. Once the experience of homelessness ends, they are still
people with needs — just as we are all people with needs.
The problem with universal language
It is
tempting to reduce people to a singular set of circumstances. We use universal
language all the time so that we can wrap our minds around solving problems. We
talk about the homeless, or single mothers, or addicts, or troubled teenagers
as whole groups of people as if they are monoliths, all needing or wanting the
same thing even when we know that there are no universa
