Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First - by Jay S Levy

Book Synopsis

This book provides social workers, outreach clinicians, case managers, and concerned community members with a pretreatment guide for assisting homeless couples, youth, and single adults. The inter-relationship between Homeless Outreach and Housing First is examined in detail to inform program development and hands on practice. Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First shares five detailed case studies from the field to elucidate effective ways of helping and to demonstrate how the most vulnerable among us can overcome trauma and homelessness.

Readers will:

• Expand their assessment skills and discover new interventions for helping people who have experienced long-term or chronic homelessness.
• Understand and be able to integrate the stages of common language construction with their own practice.
• Learn about the positive measurable impact of a Housing First approach and its moral, fiscal, and quality of life implications.
• Understand how to better integrate program policy and supervision with Homeless Outreach & Housing First initiatives.
• Learn how to utilize a Pretreatment Approach with couples, youth, and unaccompanied adults experiencing untreated major mental illness and addiction.

"Jay S. Levy's book is essential reading to both people new to the movement to end homelessness and folks who have been in the trenches for many years. Learn how to do effective outreach with the chronic homeless population, and the ins and outs of the Housing First model. The personal stories and the success cases will give inspiration to work even harder to help both individuals and for ending homelessness in your community." -- Michael Stoops, Director of Community Organizing, National Coalition for the Homeless, Washington, DC

Learn more at www.JaySLevy.com

Review Quotes

"Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First is essential reading to both people new to the movement to end homelessness and folks who have been in the trenches for many years. Learn how to do effective outreach with the chronic homeless population, and the ins and outs of the Housing First model. The personal stories and the success cases will give inspiration to work even harder to help both individuals and for ending homelessness in your community." -- Michael Stoops, Director of Community Organizing, National Coalition for the Homeless, Washington, DC

"As with his earlier works, Jay Levy engages the reader with poignant narratives of this extremely vulnerable group of people then, in this latest work, chapter by chapter, builds an effective framework for truly solving this decade's old social dilemma. I strongly recommend this book to anyone truly vested in Ending Chronic Homelessness." -- Jerry Ray, Director of Homeless Services, Mental Health Association Inc. (Springfield, MA)

"Jay Levy has now advanced his work with the chronically homeless into a comprehensive book. His Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First codifies his previous efforts and expands the knowledge base by providing new insights into helping and housing chronically homeless couples, unaccompanied youth and adults. Through Jay Levy's work, a cadre of social service workers and housing providers have come to better understand and adopt the principles of a housing first strategy and the importance of Pretreatment model in the continuing struggle to end homelessness." -- David W. Modzelewski, Housing Coordinator, Western Massachusetts Regional Network to End Homelessness

"The issues that Levy addresses in this short book, reviewed here by Lynn Vickery, go to the heart of the issue-the centrality of trusting relationships; and here Levy stresses the power of narratives and the subtleties of engagement. Levy does not just assert, but shows by example the role of shared language in creating relationships. These cameo accounts are not merely anecdotal, for educational purposes; this approach can also be deeply rooted in a fully elaborated theoretical background-in this case, linguistic analysis and social constructionism-and in turn this approach can start to form the foundations of a new intermediate level theoretical vocabulary of more immediate use to the pragmatist in frontline services." -- Robin Johnson, Editor, Excerpted from Housing, Care and Support (Dec., 2014), vol 17, (4)

Working with chronically homeless people is a vocation. It is challenging, at times frustrating and under-recognised by housing, social work and health care and not always appreciated by the professionals working at strategic and policy levels. Occasionally, a voice is heard to validate the very best of best practice and to give a theoretical underpinning to ensure that practitioners and policy makers alike can see that their actions can assist in literally recreat-ing lives. Jay S. Levy is such a voice. In his book Pretreatment Guide for Homeless Outreach & Housing First, Levy is able to speak to those involved in front-line street homelessness and say that it is possible to underpin strong processes of engagement with homeless people with a sense of purpose and humanity. Levy uses the narrative to develop a set of frameworks that can be used in supervision, evaluation and social work/housing support training. There are no lists of sterile statistics to detract from home-less people and the possibilities of turning lives around but there are extensive references to authoritative work and theory which enables the reader, especially a busy practitioner to feel assured that there is a sound theoretical basis for Levy's approach to compassionate practice." -- Lynn Vickery, Retired Senior Lecturer and Visiting Fellow at London South Bank University