“You Start with the Youth”: Narratives of Deservingness and Dissent at a Homeless Service Organization

Abstract

As they provide social services to people experiencing poverty and homelessness, many nonprofit organizations perpetuate ideologies that obscure the political and economic causes of poverty and blame poor people for their plight. But the ideologies and practices of service provision are more diverse than many scholars of the nonprofit industry have assumed. What are the processes by which professionalized service organizations not tied to broader social movements might nonetheless facilitate rather than hinder structural explanations of inequality among their clients? Using ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, and analysis of art and writing by young adults experiencing homelessness, I investigate the prevalence of structural explanations of poverty among clients at a large homeless youth service organization. I find that the organization’s liberal assimilationist narratives about “youth” facilitate more critical analyses of poverty and inequality among homeless participants. As the organization’s public-facing communications emphasize the positive meanings of youth to assert clients’ deservingness, homeless clients leverage the organization’s assimilationist discourse to advance more radical critiques of the systems that oppress them. Building on scholarship about the medicalization of homelessness and the nonprofit industrial complex, this case study demonstrates how multiple ideologies and practices spanning the continuum from repressive to mobilizing can take hold within a single organization, and by extension, the nonprofit service industry.

Homeless youth‐led activism and direct action: Lessons from a participatory research project in Tio'tia:ke/Montréal

“…To address youth homelessness, building from the work of young people most impacted by housing precarity is key (Levac et al, 2022). However, much of the mainstream advocacy on housing justice within a Canadian and international context relegates youth to committees, advisories or to simply share their ‘stories’ (Cataldo et al, 2021; Yarbrough, 2021). In this way, their true contributions ‘go unnoticed because youth are still seen as junior partners of the social movement’ (Kelley et al, 2014, p. 88).…”