Library Services for People Experiencing Homelessness

This was a great presentation by Rachel Williams about social work practices in libraries, particularly with regard to working with patrons who are experiencing homelessness. The presenter is Rachel Williams from Simmons University. These are the notes I took during the presentation: Rachel Williams - Professor at Simmons University rachel.williams@simmons.edu  Open to being contacted. New key term to consider apart from 'homeless' is 'unhoused'. One way to get library staff to talk about how they feel about working with people experiencing homelessness is to ask them to recount a time they have interacted with a person experiencing homelessness. Rachel referred to a lawsuit that would be interesting to look up - Richard Kreimer (USA) Idea: Look for mentions of 'equity of access' in library policies to see if they exist and what they say. Find: 'Invisible people' YouTube channel (Man interviews people experiencing homelessness) Find: Article by Provence ...

Nielssen, O. B., Stone, W., Jones, N. M., Challis, S., Nielssen, A., Elliott, G., ... & Large, M. M. (2018). Characteristics of people attending psychiatric clinics in inner Sydney homeless hostels .  Medical Journal of Australia ,  208 (4), 169-173. This research was mentioned during the podcast mentioned in an earlier post about rural and regional homelessness and mental health problems. I have tracked down this research and can see that it provides a study of people attending psychiatric clinics in inner Sydney homeless hostels. This is the abstract: Objective: To describe the characteristics of people attending mental health clinics at shelters for the homeless in inner city Sydney.  Design: Retrospective review of medical records of homeless hostel clinic attenders.  Setting: Mental health clinics located in three inner city homeless hostels.  Participants: Consecutive series of clinic attenders, 21 July 2008 e 31 December 2016.  Main outcome m...

This podcast is is from the Centre for Rural & Remote Mental Health and has guest speakers talking about homelessness in regional cities and in remote areas. Its focus is on NSW, but it will hild true for all parts of Australia.  The speakers are Tamara Pallos from Homelessness NSW, Penny Dordoy from Housing Plus, and Talie Star.  Talie currently facilitates the Domestic and Family Violence (DFV) Lived Experience Group with Homelessness NSW. One thing I learned from this is that there is a stream of people who leave psychiatric hospitals into homelessness. There were some stats mentioned that give a clue of the size of this. This could be used in an article about the characteristics of homelessness that libraries could be involved in.  One speaker (Penny?) mentioned that one of the greatest ways we can assist people experiencing homelessness is to give them connections back to their communities - to reduce their feelings of isolation and not belonging. Libraries could...