Deborah’s Place

Mabel Johnson

Blog Post #1

Hello! My name is Mabel Johnson, and I am a senior pursuing both a Bachelor of Social Work and a Bachelor of Arts in Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola. Loyola’s School of Social Work requires that all seniors in their undergraduate program commit to an internship at a partnering organization that spans their senior year. With this in mind, I searched in Spring 2020 for an internship that would reflect my passion and pursuits in the Women’s and Gender Studies program.

During my search, I interviewed with a residential program of Deborah’s Place, an organization that serves women who have experienced or are currently experiencing chronic homelessness.  For the Case Managers of this program, which housed women with mental or physical disabilities who had previously experienced chronic homelessness, my time in the WSGS program was of particular interest.  They expressed their trust that, with this background, I could understand and apply an intersectional approach that balanced humility and agency, which one supervisor described as critical to this position.  I am honored to share that I was invited to join as a Case Management Intern from August 2020 through April 2021!

Although my work in the WSGS program has been critical at every turn of my internship, I decided to complete the WSGS internship during the second half of my year-long position in order to form a meaningful set of goals and an informed research question. My research question is the following: How can the “Housing First” model of care––in which the prioritization of connecting persons currently homeless to housing can lead to an address of other issues, such as mental or physical health or problematic substance use—be as accessible as possible, especially for the population of primarily Black disabled women who make up this residential program?

This question arose from my impression of the first four months of my internship, from August to December 2020. I found the program to be uniquely accessible as it not only housed residents of the program but also various services for the residents, including Case Management and Health offices, gathering spaces, libraries, restrooms outside of the apartments, and more. For these residents, who qualify for the program on account of disability, the accessible provision of such services is critical to genuinely meeting the needs of the population. Through research and my goals, I hope to understand and meaningfully contribute to the accessible model of this program. This overarching goal will be critical to these next four months as I work to coordinate a completely digital and remote approach to working with these residents. Within this goal, I hope to (1) establish rapport with residents and staff alike, (2) collaborate with residents to secure tangible benefits, and (3) engage in professional development programs that will help me access those resources.

I am excited to bring you all along on this journey of research and action. Thank you for reading!

Blog Post #2

Hello again! My name is Mabel, and I’m a senior majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies and Social Work at Loyola. I’m currently a Case Management Intern at a residential program for women with disabilities within Deborah’s Place, which serves women who have experienced chronic homelessness. I began the internship by spending one day per week in the office on the internship site and the other day working from home. After COVID-19 cases continued to climb in Chicago, all Deborah’s Place interns, including myself, began to work solely at home in November. After several months of this internship, I constructed a research question and several goals that were specifically aligned with my studies in the WSGS Program. In alignment with the WSGS Internship course, I will continue to strive towards these goals until my internship concludes in late April. Overall, I hope to translate my studies from the program into direct material benefits and advocacy for the residents of my program.

My work during the last eight weeks has largely revolved around these two goals. Some tasks to secure benefits are focused on research and, at their longest, last a few hours of a given workday. Others, like the task of enrolling a resident in a program for home-delivered meals, lasted several weeks. It is during the latter that I learned just how many organizations and structures were involved in the singular task of enrolling the resident: Chicago’s 311 Service, the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, the Chicago-based organization with a home-delivered meal program to which we were assigned by CDFSS, and, lastly, my own organization. Even with online application forms, the process relied heavily on phone calls that hopped from one organization to another. Through this process, I saw how much energy, diligence, and patience were required in order to truly advocate on behalf of the resident. It took over a month to successfully enroll the resident, and I am highly conscious that this success was not ensured until after a higher member of the organizational hierarchy of our program contacted the agency to which we were assigned.

This process revealed a large gap between the goal of such benefits and the outcome of these overlapping systems by which these benefits were to be dispersed to individuals who relied upon them. From my perspective, a disabled Gender Studies student, this revealed a great need for a rethinking of how systems operate with regard to disabled populations, who rarely have the luxury of waiting over a month for accessible meals. In my independent work for the internship, I am completing an Advocacy Project, in which I continue to research how the Housing First model can live up to its promise of housing as a safe and accessible place to begin the lifelong process of recovering from trauma, homelessness, and substance abuse. As with the process of acquiring home-delivered meals, there often appears to be a gap between this model’s promise and its delivery as it is limited by (1) federal laws against public housing and (2) a failure to employ a truly intersectional understanding of spatial dynamics and what makes a space “safe” or “accessible.” I look forward to eventually transforming this research into a direct act of advocacy through letter-writing to multiple representatives at the city, state, and federal levels. Unfortunately, I do not have a photo of myself at my internship location. Instead, here is a picture of me in my Zoom room, where I meet with supervisors, residents, and fellow interns.