The Framework for an Equitable COVID-19 Homelessness Response
Priorities from Pacific Islanders
About
Why was this document created?
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, old patterns are reasserting themselves with historically marginalized communities being left out of the planning and response process. These patterns have resulted in predictable gaps in the pandemic response that have left our most marginalized neighbors at unacceptable risk. There is a clear need for further guidance to local jurisdictions who are planning for the response and recovery of the pandemic, in order to ensure that the priorities of historically marginalized communities are centered in the response.
How was this document created?
The National Working Group on Historically Marginalized Communities
The National Innovation Service (NIS) Center for Housing Justice team, along with other national leaders, started by creating a national working group on historically marginalized communities. The working group brings together a small group of national and local policy experts and advocates alongside direct service providers and people serving the communities most impacted by the pandemic. It includes representatives from mid-sized cities, rural areas, and denser cities.
Listening Sessions
Population Specific Briefs
After conducting the listening sessions, the NIS Center for Housing Justice created population-specific briefs to summarize the ideas of each of the ten communities and offer suggested actions that local jurisdictions can take in response to the concerns and priorities raised by people who are being marginalized. This document focuses on the concerns and priorities of Pacific Islander American community members participating in the listening session.
How is the document organized?
The brief is organized around 4 categories:
Space
Stuff
Staff
Systems
The four categories are based off of Dr. Paul Farmer’s Space, Stuff, Staff, and Systems Framework, a regular theme for Farmer across his work to address global health crises. These four categories are used in this brief to identify and organize essential elements within what people are experiencing and how best to respond to these experiences. You can read more about his framework here.
Under each of the 4 categories there are two sections:
What we heard
What we should do
The what we heard section summarizes the direct response of listening session participants who identified as Pacific Islander. The what we should do section offers up suggested actions from the NIS Center for Housing Justice that local jurisdictions can take in response to the concerns and priorities raised by Pacific Islander community members in the listening session.
To download an interactive pdf of the information below, click here.
Space
What we Heard
Create housing for large, multigenerational families. Pacific Islanders typically live in large, extended family groups who share childcare and other responsibilities, but there is little to no affordable housing that allows people to live with more than a couple family members. This is also true of housing vouchers that are available to homeless young people, where a single child in a family is offered housing but the family is not. People often stay with friends or family members instead of going to shelters or applying for their own apartments, so as not to be cut off from their communities. Governments and housing organizations should invest in housing and land that allow people to live together in the way that is essential to their culture and well-being.
Recognize that housing is connected to belonging. As people connected to the indigenous traditions of their islands, Pacific Islander Americans can feel homeless in the US even when they are physically housed, because they have not been granted permission to live on this land by the indigenous peoples here. There need to be efforts for Pacific Islanders to work together with Native people to get that permission and understand how they can belong here.
Provide targeted COVID services to large families living together. Pacific Islander families are being disproportionately impacted by COVID because they are living together in large numbers. One person cited the statistic that in Spokane County, Washington, Pacific Islanders make up 1% of the population, but 32% of COVID cases. Healthcare providers need to recognize the importance of those shared spaces to Pacific Islander culture and identify the best ways to protect people from COVID.
What We Should Do
Create flexible subsidies that can support larger unit sizes paired with fluctuating family sizes. This could mean setting landlord-tenant agreements that the units could be kept at a lower occupancy for a portion of the year to allow for family members to move in and move out. Another approach could be to enter into agreements with tenants and landlords to support safe doubling up when families need to share space for short periods of time. A third party special advocate organization who is trusted among Pacific Islander American community members could help broker and support these agreements between the parties.
Honor sacred traditions for Pacific Islander Americans. This includes creating opportunities for conversations between Native people and Pacific Islander Americans to grant permission for staying on the land they are living on. Make this a part of intake conversations to mutually determine next steps where desired.
Make non-congregate COVID Isolation and Quarantine units available to larger families. When isolation/quarantine is not possible at home and a member of the family is sick or has been exposed it is important to offer isolation units and quarantine options that meet the needs of large families.
Stuff
What We Heard
Give people money directly. Nonprofits that are not run by Pacific Islander communities typically do not serve those communities well, and people should have the money to make their own choices about how best to address their needs without the nonprofit industrial complex “hovering over” them or acting as a middle man. A universal basic income or other form of direct cash transfer for adults would also allow extended families to invest in shared living spaces.
What We Should Do
Widely implement simple cash transfers and other low barrier financial supports to individuals and kinship networks. Prevention and diversions services should include financial support and supportive services to kinship networks, as defined by marginalized communities, to include fictive kin. This should include flexible rental assistance or cash support to kinship networks at the same levels it is available to traditional families and direct cash transfers to individuals that can be used to support housing within kinship networks. Communities should use Cares Act funds to the extent possible within the regulations, in combination with funds divested from the police to create these flexible supports to kinship networks as a form of emergency housing assistance, particularly for youth and young adults within marginalized communities.
Staff
What We Heard
Fund organizations led and staffed by Pacific Islander Americans. Pacific Islanders do things through their community relationships, and typically only access services through their own networks and cultural organizations. There is a cultural sense of shame in asking for help without reciprocity, and people often feel that the standard service providers do not understand or are actively hostile to their needs. In order to reach more Pacific Islanders, governments and philanthropic funders should invest in building and expanding those organizations.
What We Should Do
Build, support, and fund dignity-based services led by Pacific Islander and other communities most impacted by homelessness. As CARES Act dollars are used to develop new service delivery models, dignity-centered care and service delivery must become the standard across all services and systems. Dignity-centered care in this context means a holistic approach that takes into account the reluctance of some members of the community to proactively seek help and avoids shaming or blaming people; financially supports the extended kinship networks of Pacific Islanders and taps into cultural networks for appropriate services; and equips Pacific Islander community-based organizations with the resources to apply for and receive funds. Communities should implement new performance management systems that prioritizes feedback from people who are experiencing homelessness, including Pacific Islanders, routinely engage frontline staff in identifying policy barriers to serving individuals, and inform local and federal policy changes.
Systems
What We Heard
Recognize and address police violence. Pacific Islander Americans experience regular violence from the police, who express fear of them because they are often larger than the police officers and who do not like that they gather and live together in large groups. There have been police killings of Pacific Islander men, but all police encounters with Pacific Islanders are invisible in the data because the police report them as other ethnicities (e.g. Black, Native, or Cambodian).
Defund shelters, which dehumanize people. The shelter system is a very dehumanizing system. People are not seen as human when they’re experiencing homelessness, and one person spoke about that “sociology of worthiness” as built into the shelter system. That affects how people feel about themselves, which in turn creates problems within families that were not there before. Funding for shelters should be redirected to people directly or to building the affordable housing described above.
Honor the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) designation in data collection, reporting, and political representation. Pacific Islanders have very different lived experiences and histories than Asian Americans, but are often lumped together with them in the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) grouping. This erases their present experiences, as well as the colonialist and racist oppression their communities experienced from Asian nations. Pacific Islanders should represent themselves in social and political decision-making, and all data collection and reporting should honor their preferred NHPI grouping.
Address the barriers to accessing services as a result of immigration status. Pacific Islanders from Palau, the Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia are able to live and work in the U.S. under military agreements that give the U.S. control over that area of the Pacific Ocean. Many people who are in the U.S. legally cannot get housing, jobs, health insurance, or a driver’s license without an I-94, which proves that they entered the country legally and which can be difficult to find or get. This issue needs to be addressed at the federal level.
Learn the history of Pacific Islander communities in order to address their needs. Policymakers and providers should do their research into the history of Pacific Islander communities’ relationships with government, family experience of US and Asian colonialism, and how they came to the US, which in many cases was the result of colonialist destruction of their lands. This generation of Pacific Islanders is actively deconstructing the internalized racism that Pacific Islanders were taught in mission schools. Moreover, as one person put it, COVID doesn’t feel so strange to the Samoan community, because they experienced biowarfare from the US with the active introduction of the Spanish Influenza onto the islands in 1918. No organization will be able to provide services that Pacific Islanders want without understanding that history.
Recognize extended family care in adoption law. Pacific Islanders have a culture of giving children to other family members if they can’t take care of them for a period of time. However, that can be hard to do with US adoption law. This is especially important in situations of housing instability, where people are reluctant to seek services for fear of losing their children to the foster care system, even when there are extended family members who are taking good care of them. This issue needs to be recognized by state foster care systems.
What We Should Do
Divest from policing, remove police from the homelessness response system, and invest a portion of the funds in housing and services to communities most impacted by police brutality. All across the country people are calling for immediate divestment from policing and corresponding investment into housing, healthcare, and basic services. People experiencing homelessness have consistently reported extremely high levels of unhelpful police engagement; for Pacific Islander community members these encounters often lead to violence or even death. As communities plan their Cares Act expenditures it’s clear that these dollars should not be used to fund policing activities--inclusive of ‘outreach’ teams that include police. Additionally, funds should be actively divested from policing and moved over to the creation of housing and community supports designed and operated by marginalized communities, including Pacific Islander Americans.
Implement a crisis response that ends the use of large congregate shelters and creates dignity - based, safe, temporary crisis options as a bridge to long-term housing. Current approaches to shelter that utilize large congregate settings are often actively harming people. Rather than complex and harmful shelter programs, communities should begin to transition their resources to creating an array of dignity-based, safe , temporary crisis options. Cares Act funds should be used to abolish large congregate shelters and create systems that house people rather than simply warehouse them. This will require long-term planning to shift funding away from large congregate shelters and toward:
hotel/motel/SRO options for temporary use,
The re-shaping of transitional housing stock to create more dignity based crisis options.
targeted prevention and diversions services, including financial support to kinship networks and direct cash transfers to individuals and families, that leads to less dependence on formal crisis options and
more immediate and direct access to long term housing through rental assistance and the development of affordable housing prioritized for marginalized communities.
The work of many cities, counties, and states to move people into non-congregate emergency housing during COVID-19 serves as a proof point that it is possible to re-imagine crisis options that offers a safer, more dignified solution. Communities need to continue and improve upon these efforts with CARES ACT funds in order to fully realize a system with no large congregate shelters.
Begin decoupling AAPI in policy, programs and data. Understanding the specific culture(s) and historical contexts of the people living in your geographic area is critical to being able to offer services that are responsive to their needs. Set short and long term goals for decoupling-- ask what can we do today and what will take more time, in conversation with people in the Asian American or Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities. As the specific cultures of the communities in your geography begin to come to the forefront, use this information to invest in the specific organizations that meet those cultural and language needs in policy and programs.