Opinion: Nothing About Us, Without Us

I see very few people who are currently homeless sitting around the discussion tables about what will affect our lives, and how. 

I have been an advocate for over 10 years. Before I was homeless, my primary form of advocacy was as a member of the Autistic Union. My advocacy shifted and became more about the homeless when I myself became homeless. 

I often see both autistics and homeless people purposefully excluded from having a say in decision making. This is connected to people’s beliefs that we are defective and need fixing to be “productive” members of society. 

This is ableism and infantilization and it results in making decisions that make our lives harder.

Even when there are ways we’re asked to participate in discussions about our own lives and situations, accessing those discussions is usually difficult. According to one panelist at a recent Restart Redding event, the homeless population is 70% disabled, so accessibility is a big deal. The 2022 Point in Time count for Shasta County backs that idea up saying that 21% of the homeless people surveyed were receiving disability benefits, 41% had a mental illness, 31% had a chronic health condition, and 30% had a physical disability. And Point in Time counts in general often under count the number of homeless community members overall and are likely to miss people who are not mobile and easy to find on the street.

We see a lack of accessibility when the timing of events is not compatible with the abilities of the people being served. This happens in town, state, and higher levels of government where legal terms will be pushed ahead on fancy paper while homeless people are still sleeping or before they are able to physically get to where the conversations are happening.

I sometimes wish community events about homelessness had a ticket price of “bring a homeless person as your guest” at the door. 

We the homeless people need to be there because how the community solves our scary and difficult problems matters. But when issues come up that effect us, some people in charge like to panic and close the world in on us by making decisions without us, those who are most affected.

It would be better to encourage us, the homeless people, to use real world solutions to learn how to advocate for ourselves. When your help gets in the way of self-advocacy its because you’re standing in a bad spot, right between the reality of the situation and your expectation for what should help.

Here’s a question to ask yourself: would you solve the problem, hold the event, decide how to use the funding this way if it was being done for people living in houses? And if not, why do it to us? 

Here’s a question to ask yourself: would you solve the problem, hold the event, decide how to use the funding this way if it was being done for people living in houses? And if not, why do it to us? 

Alissa Johnson

A good example of situations that are very harmful and that have never included the input of those impacted are the so-called, “quality of life” sweeps. Whose quality of life is being improved by the sweeps? Surely not mine. It only seeks to make life more unsustainable for us, keeping us in a deeper constant of survival mode. Everyday we face genuine danger from nature itself, as well from the people who stand in the way of our attempts to reach for basic dignity, much less wellness.

As fire season approaches, people become more nervous about the situation we the homeless people live in. The questions I’m asked about fire season are focused on wanting to know how to stop people from making fires. However, shelter, fire, and water are needed to survive. People want to hear ways to stop the homeless from making fires, but to survive in the elements, we need fires to cook food and clean.

The answer will never be to get people to stop making fires that are vital for their survival. If you want to prevent the homeless from making unsafe fires, build safe fire spaces. You cannot stop them from making fires, it’s impossible and entirely against survival instincts. 

This is one extreme example of how I think many ideas of “manners” are actually damaging to the body, mind, and our ability to make connections with other humans. The housedweller’s desire for the homeless to set aside survival attempts and just die in the elements to please “the community” is socially self-destructive for us, making it obvious that “the community” is only beneficial for those that have money and fit a specific mold. The focus turns into making homeless people into the boogeyman in the flesh.

Yet another example is when people take pictures of the giant pile of garbage at encampments, to smear us. What they don’t do is ask anyone living there in the encampments, or involved in the decision about garbage placement, why it is there. In many cases, we were originally instructed to bring it there for ease of removal, but the removal rarely happens.  Most media just want to focus on the garbage pile. 

This continues the measurement of how we the homeless people are considered garbage weight, until it trains the brain to blend us and the garbage pile together into one. This is how living breathing humans end up being viewed as trash.

I see many well-intentioned people offering help to those of us they perceive as lacking in some way. But perception is a dangerous and misleading thing if you don’t ask people what they actually need. It seems like house dwellers are accustomed to speaking for us or over us, treating us like 12 year olds without a say. They probably don’t see anything wrong with it. 

Only decision making that includes proper representation will change things for the better. And not just a consultation, but real listening, with follow through for the population affected.

When a situation comes up and a decision needs to be made that will impact us, instead of thinking that it must be solved for we the homeless, the decision should be opened up the way we have done in encampments. 

When nobody has ideas about how to address a situation in an encampment, we bring it to the “dry erase board” and discuss any idea, any solution to be able to do XYZ, with mitigation to risks currently faced.

Decisions should be made democratically, and that is hard in a population of people who haven’t asked for things bigger than socks and camping supplies for a while. 

Self-advocacy has to be encouraged to grow, and the agency we need to self-advocate has to be encouraged since it has for so long been systematically stifled. Sometimes this means to write out ideas collected, and suggest we can come back to this at any time if the people affected think of anything to add, giving us choices for participation and input. 

In all these situations the principle is the same, there should be facilitation of the people impacted by the decision, to be the ones involved in the decision making process.  Facilitating conversations and acting on the solutions is a much better process than imposing decisions that may not make sense to the people they are supposed to be helping.

Allowing people to have a say in decisions that impact them is always important, but it’s most important when the stakes are high. Keeping things homeless-led when decisions are difficult, in a scare or panic, is how people and programs show us they are really homeless-led.

If you’re solving problems that are about us, without us, you’re interested in controlling us, not addressing the causes of our problems.This is not healthy, this is a red flag.

People watch survival shows where a man picks pieces of food out of a bear’s turd and they call that entertainment, but this is our daily reality. We are doing what we can to survive everyday with less support and no fanfare. How long will it be before being homeless becomes a death sentence, before the remainder of our rights to exist are removed as they are already for other groups?

Let’s not sit here and find out.

Alissa Johnson is originally from Fargo, North Dakota, and has lived in Redding for about six years. She describes herself as the “chillest cellist of the North in the West.” She writes for Shasta Scout as part of our new Community Voices series, which illuminate lived experiences, identities, issues or perspectives that are often misunderstood. Community Voices is supported by a grant from the North State Equity Fund. Want to share your thoughts and opinions with our readers? You can submit your writing here.