Interview with Tory Kern from House of Hope
By Rachel Ann
For our very first interview post on HOPE’s blog, I was lucky enough to have the chance to chat with Youth Outreach Coordinator Tory Kern from House of Hope CDC, one of HOPE’s key community partners in our fight against housing insecurity in Rhode Island. Before arriving at House of Hope, Tory worked as the Outreach Coordinator for Home to Hope (H2H), a youth outreach program that first operated under the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless (RICH) and later merged with House of Hope under the name HYPE (Honoring Youth Power and Experience).
What do you usually work on at House of Hope?
I coordinate our youth outreach program which has recently been renamed by the youth we work with to HYPE, which stands for Honoring Youth Power and Experience. As the HYPE-at-House-of-Hope coordinator, I usually manage our decisions around how we outreach to youth experiencing housing insecurity in Rhode Island and overseeing the case management, which is the more one-on-one resource navigation services that we provide to about 50 youths at any given time.
We work with 15- to 24-year-olds, but almost all of the folks we work with are 18–24, with some scattered minors now and then. We usually offer resource navigation services through phone calls, texting and in-person meetings between our case managers and youth in the Providence area, but we’ll also go to folks wherever they are in the state. We provide basic needs supplies like sleeping bags, tents, food, toiletries, clothes, bus passes, safer sex and drug-related harm reduction supplies to help folks survive, but we also have more long-term goals that we help out with.
Our specialty at House of Hope is helping people apply to affordable housing. So, for young adults in Rhode Island, although there aren’t many options for emergency, transitional or permanent housing, there are some, and we are experts in what applications to those entail and we try to help folks get on housing waiting lists as quickly as possible. While we’re waiting, we make sure they get all the state benefits they’re eligible for: health insurance, supplemental nutrition assistance program benefits, connections to GED and job training programs, mental and physical health providers, domestic violence-related resources and any other social support services for youth. For the most part, I oversee our case management services, but I also lead volunteers and interns in trying to build our capacity to offer more services beyond our current ones by doing more administrative projects that grow our scope of work.
What made you first want to go into social work?
Growing up, I had the opportunity to be a part of a community meal once a month where anyone who wanted to share a meal could come. That was a very formative experience for me because I got to spend time with folks I knew from grade school, just having a meal and learning about their lives and understanding the reason why our society has led them to struggle economically.
I brought that with me to college where I was fascinated by all things related to social justice. I studied oppression through the gender studies program, education practices through the education program, took African American Studies classes and economics classes so I could understand capitalism. What with those early experiences of seeing people struggle, you know, any child wants to know why this is happening and how the world can change that. So, I ended up spending time in college interning at the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless, where I saw what it was like to try to advocate for public policies that balance resources in society and acknowledge the importance of marginalized folks being at the center of the revolution.
I also got experience working with our domestic violence and sexual assault resource center on campus, which really informed my understanding of just how many folks were experiencing interpersonal violence as a result of our oppressive society. I worked at our gender and sexuality center, which helped me dive into what it’s like to be among community members who share a social identity with you. And while working in those positions and continuing my studies in college, I met a lot of LGBTQ folks in student support services, especially people of color, who didn’t have access to family supports, or housing or food or clothes.
When I learned about youth outreach for the homeless population, I was really motivated to be a part of starting this program because I saw that youth were going to be a part of the process of figuring out the answers to questions like “how great is the need for resources?” Or “what resources are most important?” Or “how can we advocate for those resources to be sustainably funded and what sorts of practices will be most supportive to youth?” You know, instead of practices that are just a paternalistic recreation or mimicking of the oppressive systems that have put them where they are. So, I joined the youth outreach program and learned as much as I could about what was going on in Providence, even though I’m from a little further down south in RI. I’ve now turned it into a bit of a “life’s obsession” to learn about this puzzle and figure out how to make the conditions right, at least for Rhode Island, so that it can become a more equitable place for youth to have the opportunity to be free in our state, as opposed to tied down with economic and social oppression.
So, you’ve talked a little bit about what made you want to work with youths in particular. Is there something you’d like to elaborate on in this regard?
Yes. So, I quickly lose my patience when I am working “downstream” from a problem, and working with youth is one way to go a little bit further “upstream”, because youth experiencing homelessness become adults experiencing homelessness. And if the goal is to prevent homelessness in general, then it’s helpful to figure out what is happening that’s causing that homelessness, which often occurs for the first time for folks when they’re in the 18–24 age range. It directly relates back to the fact that the US government doesn’t afford people the opportunity to maintain a decent standard of living; it’s just as a birthright that’s provided to you depending on which family you’re born into. So when the state is no longer required to care for you because you’ve become an adult, and your family comes from a demographic that’s been oppressed, then you become an individual who can’t independently fulfil your own basic needs, because our society is set up to only function for folks who have the family wealth that comes from things like systemic racism and colonialism.
I appreciate working with youth because it shows that it has nothing to do with individual failings, or family failings, and everything to do with social failings, and I just find youth to be so vibrant and beautiful. Being able to reflect some of youth’s strengths back to them before this oppressive society has taken all the hope and joy out of them makes me feel like there is a possibility that they can find a sustainable path for survival, before it’s too late and the traumas have been too great.
Would you say that there’ve been any particular people who have had a big influence on you and shaped the way you approach your work with youth?
Yes. Didi is a former staff member at Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless, also known as RICH. Her full name is Donna Williams, and she and Michelle Duso are the people who originally made the program Home to Hope come to fruition. Michelle had worked in youth services for a long time and has a consulting firm that helps social justice advocacy organizations in RI do their work as best as they can. She was seeing the need for services for LGBTQ youth, especially youth of color, who were experiencing housing instability in the state. And Didi Williams was working for RICH and said she thought it would be a good place for Home to Hope to get started, since RICH could act as an incubator for Home to Hope and use its non-profit status to help the program get initial funding through the Victims of Crime Act.
What both Didi and Michelle have taught me is that doing this work well requires that we do it from a place of love instead of hate and competition. Because of this, it’s really important to call in other community members and partners to be a part of the movement and be as honest as possible with each other about the ways in which we’re not serving the folks that we care about as well as we should be. We need to make sure that we’re always taking a backseat as advocates to whatever group of folks we’re focusing on supporting. Michelle and Didi showed me that if you don’t have that loving communication with others, that absolute hope in being able to collaborate instead of competing for funds, and that ability to be a humble ally who’s critical of society, our programs and ourselves — if you don’t have those things, you’ll just end up reproducing what you are fighting against.
Would you say that your work now is very different from when you were at Home to Hope?
Yeah, the changes that happened between our program spending a year and half at RICH and this past year and a half at the House of Hope is that before, we were more trying to build a reputation among young folks, youth providers and homelessness service providers because we were quite a new program. We spent most of our time doing street outreach shifts to show that we were trustworthy, dependable and worthy of youths’ time.
By the time we got to House of Hope, we’d already accumulated a long track record of high-quality supportive services to youth, so they referred their friends and their friends referred their friends to us, which means we don’t have to actively go looking for youth as much now. We pretty much get a new referral every other day from youths based on a network of our peers. We also changed significantly when we got to House of Hope because they have a very long relationship with community members, which both increased and diversified the demographics who get referred to us, whether that’s geographically or background-wise. Being at House of Hope has also increased the types of services we can provide to youth. Some of House of Hope’s specialties are offering mobile shower trailers and medical navigation services, so we’ve been more able to offer people things like showers, haircuts and connections to medical care providers.
What are some of the most inspiring or unforgettable experiences you’ve had in your career as a social worker?
Wow, that’s a good question. The most memorable experiences have been when I am face-to-face with a young person’s most vulnerable self and we’re sharing our humanities with one another, in a way that is profound. An example of that was when I helped someone deliver their child because their partner was unable to come and they were going to give birth alone. I stayed by her side when the child was taken from her custody in the hospital because she didn’t have a place to live. When you experience someone’s raw emotions and strip back all the layers of what it’s like to be in the middle of the street, trying to survive, and you can come so close to someone, it’s something that’s impossible to forget — it puts an imprint in your mind. There’ve been a handful of experiences like that where someone is truly showing themselves — and I don’t have a guard up either, because we truly need each other to be human in that moment in order to survive, together.
That’s definitely really unforgettable and I’m really glad that you were able to be there for her.
Yeah, moments like that help remind our team that while we don’t have control over much of the social inequities, what we do have control over is how we show up in our relationships with youth. Although we will never feel like it’s enough, those relationships are transformative in and of themselves, so we have to find ways to be well enough to offer those relationships to youth, despite knowing that there isn’t a grand momentum for youth homelessness to be eradicated in the state or the country quite yet.
What would you say are some of the biggest problems facing the Rhode Island housing system?
Some of the biggest problems are the lack of government-subsidized housing, something that’s been a national trend in the past thirty years. It means that there aren’t really many options for folks whose minimum wage is $10.40/hour, which is in itself another problem. A low standard of income and high costs of rent, especially due to gentrification where folks are from, make housing really unaffordable for them. And for folks who do have enough income to afford it, there’s so little subsidized housing compared to how many people there are, and so much of it offers substandard living conditions.
Another problem is folks not having representation when it comes to evictions. There isn’t anything holding landlords accountable for providing adequate housing, and folks can be evicted in court without ever having done anything wrong, which often gives them a permanent eviction record that makes it very hard for them to get housing again in the future, especially housing that’s adequate. The other thing in this vein is folks who have been previously incarcerated. This is a national problem, but it’s true in Rhode Island as well: using the police and prison system to ineffectively try to shape a society has led to folks not being able to access jobs or housing — which is purely because of the way our society decided to handle conflict and social injustice, really. So that leads to a lot of homelessness too.
I’d say those are the main things: economic disparities related to low wages and high costs of rent; systemic racism that lead to people of color not having access to generational wealth, especially in the form of housing; present-day gentrification; and present-day slavery in the form of incarcerations, which then puts people on a track to homelessness because of the criminal record that our society stamps them with — often as a result of being a person of color who was denied economic opportunities in the first place.
What would you say are some of the biggest challenges that at-risk street youth face in Rhode Island?
The two biggest safety nets for at-risk youth in Rhode Island are, from youth’s perspective, failing them. This isn’t so much my personal opinion as it is rooted in what youth themselves share with me. They feel they can’t rely on their schools or DCYF* to keep them safe and connect them with a future that is healthy when their families aren’t able to do so, oftentimes, again, because of oppression and not because of any personal flaws. What I see a lot of is an education system that’s very neglectful of youth who don’t have the advantages of higher income, and what that turns into is those youth being denied access to educational opportunities, punished, driven into the criminal justice system, or seen as not trying hard enough and therefore losing their social network in schools, which could have been really helpful for them in terms of mentorship and overall safety.
And then when youth are struggling with conflict and violence in their families, our country and state don’t offer a restorative justice approach or family reunification-based model that aims to alleviate the social issues that oftentimes lead to family conflict. Instead, the individual families end up being punished. On top of that, there’s a failure to provide safe supportive housing and services to youth who are, for the most part, in state care. Despite many efforts to do the right thing, the way our education and foster care systems are set up aren’t aligning with the values of social justice that are needed to help prevent homelessness in the first place and assist youth in getting out of homelessness, so our schools aren’t effectively identifying, for the most part, youth who are facing housing insecurity.
And because of the harm that our state care system creates, many families are hiding from it, which means our state doesn’t know how many families there are who are unwell. For youth, you’re at risk the more alone you are. So if you’re isolated from your family, your school and the foster care system because all end up being unhealthy due to systemic oppression and social injustice, then your challenges are going to be that much greater. What the symptoms of that end up being are unhealthy relationships, domestic violence, sexual assault, substance abuse, mental illness that’s left untreated, lots of barriers to education, lots of barriers to employment, not having a history of renting or working, not having anyone there to help you with getting a driver’s license, which leads to decades-long transportation barriers…
Being taught that you don’t matter is, overall, what makes youth experiencing homelessness most at risk, because they have less hope for a good future, and less belief that they can survive — and that the world would be better off if they did survive.
What are some of the key initiatives that community partners have engaged with in the past in order to combat these problems/challenges?
I get most of my examples from outside of Rhode Island because I do find that some states have started dreaming bigger, sooner than we have. It’s extremely helpful when folks raise minimum wage at the state level, since we haven’t yet at the federal level. It’s also extremely helpful when communities not only extend foster care services to last till folks are 21 instead of 18, but also drastically dismantle and rebuild their state care systems. No one has done that perfectly yet, but some states are trying to prioritize families being well instead of segregating family members from each other. Connecticut is the state I look to for examples the most, but California and New York are also some of the states that tend to have more forward-facing programs. Florida also has a program that makes college free for students experiencing homelessness, which is awesome. Here’s a homeless youth policy scan that shows some of the most progressive policies that exist. Those policies also relate to funding, because once you enact policy, then funding opportunities can automatically become available — once you say, “This group of people is entitled to this service”, then the government has to provide funding and programs can be built from that funding. Some of those that are directly related to youth homelessness include the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program, which is a federal grant that give a community enough money to effectively prevent and end youth homelessness by building a system that actually works. Connecticut is our closest neighbor who has implemented this, alongside Massachusetts.
I’ve also seen examples of communities having grassroots mutual aid efforts and more indigenous-based practices of sharing land and resources with one another. These communities heal by way of taking the initiative to care for one another first, rather than waiting for the government to. Some of Rhode Island’s best programs so far are Foster Forward’s Rapid Rehousing Program, which helps youth find an apartment, pay for it for up to 2 years and learn the skills needed to survive, like how to get a job, how to get into college, how to take care of one’s health and how to maintain an apartment and navigate the financial system. Foster Forward has been a shining example of how helpful that work can be. We still don’t have a systemic response, which means there’s a limit to how wide-reaching and effective it is, but it’s one of the shining stars in our community that has made a huge difference.
In the 3 years I’ve had this job, we started off with no housing opportunities — emergency, transitional or permanent — for youth experiencing homelessness. Now Foster Forward provides that transitional housing. Community Care Alliance in Woonsocket also provides some transitional housing, and Sojourner House, a domestic violence agency in Providence, is trying to get into the youth housing game now. A number of Community Development Corporations are also building plans to provide permanent affordable housing specifically designed for youth and young adults.
In terms of grassroots organizations, there’s also the Providence Youth Student Movement, which has been working for a very long time on building community momentum towards housing cooperatives and host-home networks for queer and trans people of color who are often young adults. So that network of folks has also been a key initiative that has helped to counteract the major problems of youth housing instability in Rhode Island.
I’m also a big fan of the Central Falls School Department for putting restorative justice practices in place there. Rhode Island’s Youth Restoration Project has expanded their offerings to try to get more and more community organizations and schools to be more restorative and less punitive, which has a big impact on preventing homelessness among youth.
Has COVID drastically changed the way these solutions are delivered? Have you had to adapt your approach to your own work at House of Hope?
Yeah, we’ve definitely had to. First off, there’s been a really large increase in the number of youth experiencing homelessness, because many of the youths who were renting apartments in a coop or in affordable housing can no longer afford it due to different reasons, such as the fact that they don’t have jobs or can’t depend on government insurance. We’re finding that many people who were already housed and paying rent are now being told to leave without getting legally evicted, so they don’t get eviction assistance either, and oftentimes they’re also not eligible for state rental assistance.
The other thing we’re seeing is that so many of youths who were relying on couch-surfing before are now no longer welcome into families’, friends’ and community members’ homes because of the health risk that they bring in going in and out of the house whenever they try to meet their basic needs by working or getting food. When families self-isolate, then obviously they’re much less able to take in a community member. Lots of youth used to rely on their grandparents for housing and are now not able to stay with them anymore, because of the health hazards they could bring to their elderly family members.
So, the folks who were housed in market housing, which is as cheap as it can be but still quite expensive, don’t have the income to afford the housing anymore. The folks who were couch surfing, on the other hand, don’t have places to stay anymore, and the folks who were already experiencing street homelessness don’t have a youth shelter to go to. For the most part, the adult shelter is pretty unsafe — 9 out of 10 youths say they don’t even want to think about going to an adult shelter. But for the few shelters that are safe, the demand for those spaces has sky-rocketed. Shelters have also had to degentrify because you can’t pack as many people in a room anymore, so that decreases availability of beds. And obviously now there are so many more adults experiencing homelessness, so the demand has gone up and the supply has gone down in terms of emergency shelter, transitional and permanent housing.
The pandemic has changed our work in that we’re now focusing on doing things as efficiently as possible, especially in terms of creating faster ways to apply for emergency, temporary or permanent housing. We’re also spending a lot more time on cooperating with community partners to get more supply donations and deliver them to lots of areas around the state.
Since COVID and social isolation has had such a toll on people’s mental health, we now focus a lot on trying to help folks get access to substance abuse and mental health recovery services. There’s also been an increase in domestic violence, which has led us to be more active in helping people access domestic violence resources, a task that’s been even more difficult than usual because the whole state and, indeed, the whole country, has been experiencing more domestic violence with social isolation, increased stress and worse economic standards.
This is also linked to how we’ve been spending a lot more time trying to help high school students who are in tenuous housing situations survive. Usually they’re unemployed and going to school virtually, but the absence of mentorship and tutoring services, as well as the fact that many of them live in unsafe homes, are making it really hard for them to have classes effectively.
Unfortunately, many places offering physical healthcare services are closed, so we don’t get to help folks get established with primary care physicians as much. Another thing we do help out with more now, though, is helping people schedule DMV+ appointments and collect their vital documents for DHS~-related things like food stamps and health insurance. But many of those basic benefits have been so much harder to obtain than they ever were before coronavirus, because if you can’t just show up at the state office in person, then it’s much harder for folks to get the things that they need.
Have your goals for youth outreach efforts in the coming year changed a lot because of the pandemic?
Our goals have definitely shifted. We’re still trying to fulfil the same purpose but the way that we go about it is very different. Since we’re not as able to spend time in drop-in spaces like Youth Pride and AS220 anymore, we have to make sure we’re very connected digitally with youth, which we can do by sharing resources and engaging with our community partners in order to find out when they’re offering virtual resources. This way, we can constantly be involved in youth’s lives and remain an accessible resource for them.
The other thing is that since folks are no longer able to come to meal sites or drop-in centers, we need to spend more time meeting them wherever they’re staying outside through street outreach. To summarize, I’d say that our goals will now revolve less around site-based outreach and more around digital and street outreach.
One of our other major goals moving forward is building much stronger partnerships with the homeless student liaisons at high schools, at least in the urban core and major cities in the north of Rhode Island. We’re just trying to find ways to identify youth experiencing homelessness earlier and connect them to what few resources do exist, so we don’t have to wait until they turn 18 to try to support them.
The other thing is that neither adults nor youth want to stay in shelters, really, so coronavirus has given us an opportunity to advocate for hotel programs in Rhode Island. We also want to push for low-barrier rental assistance programs and a really strong network of employment help in the state, but we know that what we really need is direct cash assistance for youth, because there aren’t really any jobs anymore. So, working with community organizations in that respect would be one of our new goals as well.
Another goal for the state that trickles down to House of Hope and its youth program is creating incentives for landlords to house folks experiencing homelessness, so we hope to also engage with work on that front.
What do you think the average person or Brown student can do to help fight against housing insecurity at this time?
I would recommend that they follow the newsletter from Homes RI since they’re the local movement leader for policy and system change. Register to vote wherever you are, if you’re eligible to vote, and advocate with local, state and national legislators to support Homes RI’s causes and initiatives — they have lots of opportunities to engage in things like signing petitions, calling senators or voting for addenda. Also, I’d suggest that people read Nathaniel Pettit’s senior thesis on gentrification on the East Side.
Would you have any advice for anyone who’s thinking of entering social work?
I would say to take a lot of time to examine your underlying belief systems; to ask yourself why you’re doing the work, what you’re getting out of it and what you hope others will get out of it. Another thing that’s really important is surrounding yourself with people you trust to continually interrogate those messages in our heads that we’re born out of capitalism, racism, sexism etc., because those messages are really stubborn. They want to stay in our heads because they allow the dominant groups in this country to maintain power. It’s so much easier than someone might think to reproduce those things, even if what you’re providing seems equitable and justice-oriented. So, don’t let up, and surround yourself with people who won’t let up on analyzing not just your approach to social work, but also who you’re centering in it and who really benefits from it. Ask yourself whether your work is transformational enough to destroy the problems that put us where we are, rather than keep us in this existing system for longer, with just a little less pain.
Thank you so much, Tory! If you’d like to delve deeper into the issue of youth homelessness in Rhode Island, Tory recommends some further reading on the topic:-
Falling Through the Cracks: Homeless Students in RI: https://www.housingworksri.org/Portals/0/Uploads/Documents/Falling%20Through%20the%20Cracks,%20Student%20Homelessness%20in%20RI.pdf
· Describes how RI schools are failing to identify and serve students experiencing homelessness
· Gives recommendations for statewide improvements
Results from the 2018 Youth Point in Time Count: find them here
· most recent data on youth experiencing homelessness in RI (2020 PIT was postponed due to COVID)
Reasons we have seen an increased need for youth homelessness outreach services in RI:
- Residential colleges and job training programs (job corps) being closed means youth are displaced from their housing
- High schools being virtual meaning schools are not providing tutoring, guidance counseling, school social workers, and mentorship from teachers which leads to more youth needing resource navigation services
- Covid unemployment leading youth to losing their job and not being able to afford a room for rent or apartment anymore. Some youth are engaging in sex work because it is the only employment they can access which leads to a need for more staff time to help them navigate STI testing and safety planning. Many youth had to stop working in order to provide childcare for their children who were previously in state-funded daycare.
- Mental health — worse mental health realities because of stress from COVID, economic recession, police brutality, and isolation which lead sto needing more staff time for navigating virtual mental healthcare services https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20200306/is-anxiety-as-bad-as-outbreak-mental-health-professionals-offer-advice-on-coping-with-coronavirus
- Takes more time per capita because youth are not traveling into core cities for drop-in youth centers where we used to meet them together. Youth no longer getting bussed to school or bus passes for school which keeps them at their homes needing us to visit/deliver to them.
- Social distancing for health reasons — Couch surfing is not an option because friends/family/community members do not feel safe having guests in their home. Many youth stay outside so they can work because they can’t live with an elderly/sick family/friend and go in and out of the house to/from work and risk infecting them. Social distancing rules is placing more youth in isolation from their social support systems that not only provide housing but also resource navigation which outreach workers then see an increased need for.
- Increased need for the general population to stay at domestic violence shelters so fewer openings in DV shelters for youth adults. More DV incidents means more staff time needed for safety planning, calling DV shelters daily, and helping victims establish stability after fleeing https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20200415/calls-to-ri-domestic-violence-helplines-up-29
- Increased drug overdoses and need for emergency healthcare service navigation https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20200917/fatal-overdoses-spike-in-ri-as-more-toxic-drugs-and-covid-isolation-create-rsquoperfect-stormrsquo
*DCYF: Department of Children, Youth, and Families
+DMV: Department of Motor Vehicles
~DHS: Department of Human Services
