Kinda on the same subject
I was reading Dru’s blog entry about fear and it was making me think about my training to do shelter intakes.
This is how it worked at shelter. Women called for help. We turned away most of the women who called (9 out of 10) because either we were full or we didn’t have a room to fit their needs. (Our grants stipulated who could sleep in what room so even if we technically had space, if the woman had 2 kids — and one was an infant who co-slept or something — she couldn’t have the room with 2 bed, she had to have the room with 2 beds and a crib. Stupid, I know. We all thought it was stupid but we had to stick by the rules or lose our funding.) Anyway, if we thought a space might open up for the woman, we might do a phone intake on her. The phone intake was pretty short but as always, humiliating, since the callers were stuck telling perfect strangers why they were homeless and whether or not they had had a glass of wine in the past 48 hours. (Our rules said that you had to have 48 hours clean and sober — even if you didn’t have a substance abuse problem — and other shelters made it more like 2 weeks. We used to have women detoxing in shelter because of our short clean time but we felt like it allowed us to help more women so we kept to it.) Ok, so if the woman’s phone intake worked out and if we had space, we would make an appointment for her to come in for an intake.
The intakes were 4 pages of personal questions and a whole bunch of rules and agreements to sign. Most intakes took at least an hour. During intake, my trainer told me, it’s important to listen to your intuition about whether or not this client was safe to come into shelter. Here’s the problem: how do you know when it’s your intuition working and when it’s your internal prejudices?
Sitting across from a young African-American woman with an angry expression and a history of gang involvement, is my discomfort due to the vibes she’s putting off? Or is it just racism causing me to shift in my chair?
I remember one time this white woman was in shelter and she looked like a pretty, well-dressed college student.
She doesn’t look homeless!” I blurted out in my trainer’s office.
“You’d be surprised,” she said. It turned out that this client had severe mental health issues and should have been screened out by the night-shift shelter worker but she (the worker) was probably as drawn in by this client’s looks as I was. Anyway, the client ended up disintegrating in shelter and had to be asked to leave for threatening her roommate.
When I realized that my “intuition” was actually my -isms sending bad signals, I reacted by going the other way. I was more likely to let someone in if they disturbed me (barring blatant warning signs) and that didn’t work either. Eventually I found a happy medium.
Anyway, I appreciate what Dru is talking about. I think it’s important for our safety to listen to our intuition but I appreciate how worrying it is when we don’t know whether it’s intuition or -ism’s talking.
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