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A Community Needs Assessment Plan: Addressing Homelessness Through Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration
Miatta Teasley
Walden University
Social Chge Action: P, C, & A-Fall 2024
Professor Kristin Leigh Ballard
October16,, 2024
A Community Needs Assessment Plan: Addressing Homelessness Through Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration
Homelessness has been a persistently complex, intransigent problem, affecting the lives of millions around the world. Its genesis goes right back to some basic systemic problems: poverty, lack of mental health care, lack of affordable housing, entrenched social prejudice. The intervention models currently operant show Band-Aid-type strategies, like emergency shelters, which, in fact, amount to no more than window dressing. That would be asking for a deeper analysis of it, but one that could be more articulate-to go further than immediate needs to the root cause, so to say. This essay depicts a community needs assessment plan that incorporates two broad-based goals through which long-term solutions for homelessness can be devised; pinpoints key sources of information that will be tapped in analyzing the extent of homelessness and suggests a means of assembling a potent multidisciplinary team to work on this issue.
Refined Problem Statement
Homelessness is a growing social crisis fostered by the absence of affordable housing, inadequacy of mental health services, and even deeper economic disparities. Typical efforts at this time are pretty limited in that they often address symptomatic relief sans systemic change. Truly, the issue does call for a holistic approach where there would be long-term consideration of a number of contributors to housing instability. Of crucial importance, however, is the fact that one of the critical failures with respect to the attempt to address homelessness has been to relate it to individual failing rather than as a function of broader societal failures relative to healthcare, housing, and/or job opportunities (Stroh, 2015). Indeed, addressing homelessness requires more than a set of alleviating measures; it requires systemic reforms tackling the very roots of this issue while at the same time empowering those people who have been caught up in it.
Community Needs Assessment Goals
The dual purposes of this community need assessment are to increase the availability of emergency shelters and healthcare services for homeless persons, while promoting systemic changes in the community that will increase the availability of affordable housing and reduce barriers to mental health services. This meets the dimensions of homelessness along both immediate and systemic lines by trying to serve the needs of the community in the short term while working towards longer-lasting solutions.
Data Sources for the Community Needs Assessment
It is also multidimensional and complex, hence requiring a set number of sources to consider the data. Such examples include local housing policies and laws since they are significant in understanding the regulatory environment around access to housing. Legal frameworks of affordable housing enable the analysis of the gaps of policy, which increase homelessness. The team could then develop changes in legislation that may support long-term solutions (Beer et al., 2019).
Demographic and statistical data on homelessness will be indicative of vulnerability. This will emanate from local shelters and nonprofit organizations in helping to target the intervention by the team through a deepened understanding of the demographic makeup of homeless persons in terms of age, race, and other health conditions (Murray et al., 2024).
Public health data will also be collected on the mental health services available, in a bid to appreciate how shortfalls occur in the addressing of homeless persons with active mental health. These are important in formulating interventions that respond to the mental health needs of homeless persons’ populations (Sleet & Francescutti, 2021). Moreover, retrospective data with regard to past housing initiatives, including housing-first programs, will be offering insight into the interventions that have equally worked in the reduction of homelessness. In this way, what can be learned from various successes and failures of past efforts will hugely inform future interventions. According to Olivet et al. (2021), this shows one of the many ways the intervention could be informed.
These would be stakeholder interviews and community people survey that will capture the qualitative data about lived experiences of homelessness. The on-the-ground perspective lent by this will be of importance in identifying gaps in services and the designing of effective and empathetic interventions.
Building a Multi-Disciplinary Team
The full response to homelessness requires collaboration across a number of professions. Members shall have specialized knowledge on different aspects of the issue at hand. For example, an executive director of a homeless shelter shall have firsthand experience with the problems that homeless people go through and hence shall help ensure that the proposed interventions are realistic and relevant to community needs. They will bring expertise on the mental health service level on how mental health and homelessness relate in the design of accessible and effective services. Lastly, local housing officials will also provide their understanding of policy and zoning regulations to guide development in creating an affordable housing initiative. In addition to this, business leaders and formerly homeless individuals will add immense value in terms of discussing economic empowerment and lived experience, respectively, to ensure that proposed solutions are workable and humane.
Conclusion
Homelessness requires an approach that incorporates immediate relief with long-term systemic intervention. The research, with clear goals aimed at an essay on the needs assessment of the community, using a variety of sources in an effort to bring wholesome insight into the issue, informs strategies that would address the root causes and immediate needs of the homeless population. This interplay of the cited complex variables involves developing multidisciplinary teams with competencies in housing policy, mental health, and lived experience that promote the development of sustainable solutions that assure housing stability with social equity.
References
Beer, A., Ayres, S., Clower, T., Faller, F., Sancino, A., & Sotarauta, M. (2019). Place leadership and regional economic development: A framework for cross-regional analysis. Regional
Murray, C., Smith, J., & Johnson, L. (2024). Social perceptions and language in homelessness. Journal of Human Services, 45(2), 123-134.
Olivet, J., Wilkey, C., Richard, M., Dones, M., Tripp, J., Beit-Arie, M., & Cannon, R. (2021). Racial inequity and homelessness: Findings from the SPARC study. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 693(1), 82-100. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716221991040
Sleet, D. A., & Francescutti, L. H. (2021). Homelessness and public health: A focus on strategies and solutions. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(21), 11660. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182111660
Stroh, D. P. (2015). Systems thinking for social change: A practical guide to solving complex problems, avoiding unintended consequences, and achieving lasting results. Chelsea Green Publishing.
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