Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First: Helping Couples, Youth, and Unaccompanied Adults
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Author: Jay S. Levy
Publisher: Loving Healing Press
Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1615992014
ISBN 13: 978-1615992010
Hardcover:
ISBN 10: 1615992022
ISBN 13: 978-1615992027
This book provides social workers, outreach clinicians, case managers, and concerned community members with a pretreatment guide for assisting homeless couples, youth, and single adults. Chapters explore policy and research accompanied by narratives that trace a person's journey from homelessness to housing and beyond. The inter-relationship between Homeless Outreach and Housing First is examined in detail to inform program development and hands on practice.
Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First shares five detailed case studies from the field to elucidate effective ways of helping and to demonstrate how the most vulnerable among us can overcome trauma and homelessness.
Readers will:
Expand their assessment skills and discover new interventions for helping people who have experienced long-term or chronic homelessness. Understand and be able to integrate the stages of common language construction with their own practice. Learn about the positive measurable impact of a Housing First approach and its moral, fiscal, and quality of life implications. Understand how to better integrate program policy and supervision with Homeless Outreach & Housing First initiatives. Learn how to utilize a Pretreatment Approach with couples, youth, and unaccompanied adults experiencing untreated major mental illness and addiction.
"Jay S. Levy's book is essential reading to both people new to the movement to end homelessness and folks who have been in the trenches for many years. Learn how to do effective outreach with the chronic homeless population, and the ins and outs of the Housing First model. The personal stories and the success cases will give inspiration to work even harder to help both individuals and for ending homelessness in your community."
Michael Stoops, Director of Community Organizing
National Coalition for the Homeless, Washington, DC
Learn more at JaySLevy.com
Another empowering book from Loving Healing Press LovingHealing.com
Review
Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First
Jay S. Levy's book is essential reading to both people new to the movement to end homelessness and folks who have been in the trenches for many years. Learn how to do effective outreach with the chronic homeless population, and the ins and outs of the Housing First model. The personal stories and the success cases will give inspiration to work even harder to help both individuals and for ending homelessness in your community.
Michael Stoops, Director of Community Organizing
National Coalition for the Homeless
Washington, DC
Housing, Care and Support UK Journal vol 17, no 4 ~ Lynn Vickery's Book Review Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First
Jay S. Levy
Published by Loving Healing Press Inc.
ISBN 978-1-61599-201-0
Working with chronically homeless people is a vocation. It is challenging, at times frustrating and under recognised by housing , social work and health care and not always appreciated by the professionals working at strategic and policy levels . Occasionally a voice is heard to validate the very best of best practice and to give a theoretical underpinning to ensure that practitioners and policy makers alike can see that their actions can assist in literally recreating lives. Jay S. Levy is such a voice. In his book entitled ' Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First', Levy is able to speak to those involved in front line street homelessness and say that it is possible to underpin strong processes of engagement with homeless people with a sense of purpose and humanity.
Levy uses cameos of his own encounters with homeless people to illustrate the person to person approach that centralises the other person's sense of the encounter: if it takes a number of seemingly fleeting short 'meetings' over a period of time before any directional conversation takes place, then that's just fine. The power of Levy's approach to practice is that it is strongly goal oriented but has none of the sterile and futile language of targets and outcomes that are all too often the way in which success and justification of funding is described and measured.
The fairly short book (144 pages) is in places something of a 'page turner', especially when bringing to life the development of relationships with young and older people and insights gained from working with couples. These are not 'case studies' but rather more central to the structure and argument of the book; that there is a way of approaching homeless people prior to any treatment or intervention that maintains the integrity of all concerned and opens the way to beneficial change.
Levy uses the narrative to develop a set of frameworks that can be used in supervision, evaluation and social work/housing support training. There are no lists of sterile statistics to detract from homeless people and the possibilities of turning lives around but there are extensive references to authoritative work and theory which enables the reader, especially a busy practitioner to feel assured that there is a sound theoretical basis for Levy's approach to compassionate practice.
In his first chapter Levy defines pretreatment as ' an approach that enhances safety while promoting transition to housing and /or treatment alternatives through client centred supported interventions that develop goals and motivation to create positive change' ( p2) and one can imagine that this sort of definition sits well with policy makers and commissioners of services. However, Levy's approach to practice enables us to see that this definition is full of substance and principled positioning. As such the person centred approach and goal focussed personal planning will find resonance with a number of initiatives in the UK, notably in the support of vulnerable needs' groups.
But Levy's work is most definitely centred on chronically homeless people with all the practical difficulty of itinerancy and engagement thus making planned support more challenging. Hence the emphasis on pretreatment and the need to form relationships of trust before suggesting and facilitating change that may result in finding a home and restoring the elements of purposeful life - economic security, better health, and engagement with society.
In a recent informal conversation with an experienced outreach mental health worker in the East End of London I mentioned this book and realised that I was having that kind of conversation one has when recommending a book to a book club group - 'You really must read this book!'.
About the Author
Jay S. Levy has spent the last twenty-five years working with individuals who experience homelessness. He is the author of the newly published book Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First: Helping Couples, Youth, and Unaccompanied Adults, as well as the highly acclaimed book Homeless Narratives & Pretreatment Pathways: From Words to Housing. Jay has also published a monograph and several journal articles on Homelessness issues. He has helped to develop new Housing First programs such as the Regional Engagement and Assessment for Chronically Homeless Housing First program (REACH). This was adopted by the Western Massachusetts Regional Network as an innovative approach toward reducing chronic homelessness and has also been integrated into the Pioneer Valley's 10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness.
Jay received his MSW degree in clinical social work from Columbia University in 1988. He has achieved formal recognition from the Commonwealth of MA Department of Mental Health for his ongoing efforts to help under-served homeless individuals through his direct service, clinical supervision of staff, and program development. Jay is currently employed by Eliot CHS-Homeless Services as a Regional Manager for the statewide SAMHSA-PATH Homeless Outreach Program and Eliot's Western MA Housing First Program.
Jay lives in Western MA with his wife Louise and his two children, Talia and Sara. He is also an avid stargazer. If you have any questions or thoughts that you would like to share with Jay, you can e-mail him at jlevy@eliotchs.org