Was debating whether or not I should make a new GIF, but time's running out, so I guess we'll be running with this one. Last week was the first full week of work and it was... not as busy as I had expected. Monday was pretty casual, worked at Joe van Gogh from 11 to 3 and then had office hours until 7. Nothing too crazy happened, in fact, only 1 of 4 Members I was supposed to meet with showed up, but that was an interesting interaction. The Member, who will remain unnamed for obvious reasons, was struggling with an eviction; to be specific, he had already been evicted. He was simply living in the apartment he was evicted from until the landlord locked the room, which was obviously very scary for both him and us, as that could happen whenever. We tried to talk with him about his immediate plans for if he came back one day to the apartment locked, and while he seemed to be in contact with some friends for couch surfing, he (understandably) seemed averse to the idea of staying in a shelter. The Member wanted our help to contact various landlords and companies to try and find him a new place to stay. We tried to explain to him that the likelihood of a landlord accepting him with his outstanding debt to his previous landlord was close to none and that we should work on reducing that debt and improving his credit, but he was adamant about contacting more landlords at the moment. Since at CEF we only help people reach the goals they want us to help guide them towards, we of course obliged and made several calls. It was just difficult because we knew that nobody would take him in if he didn't get rid of his debt, but in his trauma and with his current mindset, he wouldn't budge and didn't want to work on credit.
This was definitely a moment of conflict for me. In helping him do what he wanted, I knew that we weren't getting him any closer to his actual goal of finding new housing. However, I also knew it was not my place to tell him what to do especially after he didn't listen to our recommendation the first few times around.
Tuesday, we had a staff meeting from 9-10:30 am, and then office hours 3-5 pm. Neither of my members showed up during office hours, so the office was fairly boring during that time. I just worked on my laptop assessment, which is coming along very nicely! I should be done with it by next Tuesday.
Wednesday, there was a "philosophy time," which is an analysis of a reading, from 10-11 am. The article was on healing-centered engagement, which was a relatively new concept to me, but it makes sense in that its focused on grassroots healing and positive aspects of people instead of defining them by their traumas. I also just don't have office hours on Wednesday, so I spent the rest of the day working on the laptop test and my Low Income Housing Tax Credit spreadsheets. I'm basically supposed to compare two sheets and update CEF's version to contain all the information on the other two. I started writing a program to do that for me, so we'll see how that comes along.
Thursday was another interesting day. In the morning, we had our Durham tour, which was very informative. We learned about different neighborhoods, their origins, their current state, and we talked about how members felt about them. McDougald Terrace is apparently the one members try and stay away from the most. After that, I had a small lunch break at Swift, and then went to Families Moving Forward, at which, my member didn't attend. At the office, my first member was like 40 minutes late, so we didn't have much time to do anything. She came in with a housing voucher though, so we decided next week, we would email and call landlords at properties she wanted to visit. The next member I had, I simply went through downloading Google and Bandcamp on his phone.
For dinner Thursday, I had it with two coworkers and a Member, which was really nice to get to know them out of the workplace! The one weird thing, however, was that having met with the Member before, I knew that he wasn't supposed to meet with female advocates, and both my coworkers were girls. He made some potentially problematic statements, but I wasn't sure whether to intervene or not make a scene, so I didn't say anything, especially considering they didn't seem bothered at all. It was just a weird situation to be in, but nothing bad came out of it, so I just brought it up to them afterward.
Friday was fun, we rode Lime scooters to ReCity, it was just a little disappointing our tour was cut out.
Here comes Week 5!
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