Extending access to desktop social services through community-based support

According to the most recent Point-in-Time Count data published by Maricopa County, approximately 7000 people currently live unhoused in Phoenix, AZ and 553 unsheltered people died in 2021 valley wide. We have seen the number of people attending our thrice weekly community support events continue to swell in 2022. We expect to learn that the published number of people living unhoused and the number of people who perished on the street will grow again, as it has for the last 7 years. Furthermore, the numbers of individuals living and dying on the streets has and continues to rise parabolically in the last 4 years. The data shows we are clearly in a deepening crisis and it appears to be accelerating.

In 2021 the city of PHX cut funding to the housing budget and currently there are shelter beds available for less than ¼ of the unhoused population, leaving roughly 5400 people living and attempting to sleep outdoors in the valley, every night. This is all in the face of raising the police budget by approximately $100M in the last 2 years. With the local rulers unwilling to make the changes necessary to support its population, they continue to let people languish in the dangerous heat of our poorly shaded Urban Island. There is nowhere for a person to legally exist while unsheltered in the valley. Many people are forced to live on the pavement in close proximity to the primary hub of valley social services located in DTPHX called The Human Services Campus (HSC). This large concentration of people creates many problems and cannot be healthily managed by the community it inhabits.

All of our work at Feed Phoenix is rooted in meeting people where they are. Feed Phoenix is an abolitionist, all-volunteer, horizontally aligned organization. We start by asking people what they need while attempting to minimize our bias and judgment. We continue to learn about, and practice, harm reduction and supporting people with a focus on the Social Determinants of Health. We have learned much about the culture and associated trauma that comes from living Unsheltered. We learned to build community with people that are often distrusted or dismissed. This shared trust enabled us to learn of new, often hidden, encampments and to better understand both the collective and individual needs of the people we were meeting.

We host three weekly community support events around Phoenix, and focus specifically on sharing community supplied resources with people that choose to attend. We try to greatly minimize barriers to access and do not require ID or any records for attendance at any of these community events. Also, we arrive to these events, as physical outsiders, with a plan. However, we acknowledge and respect intimate communities' ability to self organize for their own benefit and attempt to work within the framework that is sometimes unspoken but clearly socially valuable. This enables a genuine reciprocal trust within our larger shared community, and specifically between the people in Feed PHX and new neighbors we meet. Furthermore, several members of our organization are currently unsheltered or have been previously. These principals are paramount for our ability to bridge the gap created by distrust in traditional government services and the resources they control. We are reminded often by members of the unsheltered community of their dissatisfaction with current outreach programs. In anchoring our engagement to the sharing of community provided resources and non carceral solutions to conflict, we were able to greatly increase the rate at which we were meeting people living unsheltered. When we started with this method, we were engaging 25 - 30 people at an event, and now we engage 150 - 250 people every event and approximately 700 people a week. While it’s obvious that an increasing population of unsheltered individuals would generally increase engagement, the growth we have seen is clearly greater than the increase of said population.

There have been many people working to change the status quo and emphasize the failure of the municipalities in the valley, and there have been some positive results. We are seeing our PHX city rulers start to invest in fully supportive housing services and they are finally recognizing that we are in a severe crisis, though their statements and commitment to funding do not state any clear goals in housing or even attempt to shelter every individual. The large encampment outside of the HSC is gaining significantly more attention and invested community energy. We have gained access to the Homeless Management Information Services (HMIS) which enables us to make direct referrals for services outside of traditional resident requests. The base of community support is growing at a commensurate rate to our engagement. Our larger community is organizing against the constant attempts to criminalize people living unsheltered. A growing number of activated community members have been able to bring significant pressure and were able to halt the recent AZ House Bill aimed at using the police to arrest away the unsheltered population and the House Bill attempting to limit the public recording of police.

This project, alongside the larger community effort, is connecting people to services and resources that would otherwise be inaccessible to many who cannot advocate digitally, for many reasons, or are not able to be part of the conversation when our rulers are distributing our publicly controlled resources. We are learning and teaching each other, as a community, how to acquire and share resources. We are learning how to solve conflict without relying on the State to intervene. We are collectively building systems of support that are freely shared within our growing community.

Overall, I have learned that the coordination of people and services, even those freely offered, is not easy. Our timeline for this project changed dramatically as the bureaucracy that surrounded getting access to government programs, regardless of who is administering them, is lethargic. However, following the community led approach we have created something that can remain versatile and useful for the foreseeable future, well beyond the project end date.