Why front-line workers need policy training, and policy needs front-line workers
Like most people, I have no background in public policy. But, like for absolutely everyone, public policy impacts almost every aspect of my life. It’s a funny, perhaps even perplexing phenomenon that most of us going about our daily lives have no idea about the policies and legislation — let alone the ideological underpinnings — that shape our society.
Why is public space reserved for mostly cars? Why does my rent money subsidize someone else’s mortgage? Why do we have food banks if food is a fundamental right?
There are so many questions whose answers are rooted in and shaped by public policy.
In perfect honesty, I didn’t ask these questions for a very long time. When you’re relatively comfortable, like I was, it can be a little too easy to look the other way. But you have only a limited understanding of the world you live in if you don’t actively engage in and learn about the policy-making that defines it. And when you relinquish that knowledge, you ultimately relinquish power to others who can and will hold it over you.
I tumbled my way into examining policy by accident. I’ve worked front-line with unhoused people since 2014, and while I had some understanding of the role of public policy, it wasn’t my primary interest. I liked working directly with people — I still do. It feels tangible in a way that policy work can’t match.
But at a certain point, working front-line, you start to question what you’re doing when nothing ever seems to get better. The need grows. The trauma compounds. People spend another day deprived of basic necessities, except for whatever meagre resources you’re able to share.
Simply put, it’s unsustainable, both materially but also spiritually. I found it debilitating to feel unable to change the levels of poverty I saw. My work felt like I was merely serving poverty, and nothing I was doing could help end it. That’s what burnout looked like for me.
In my sector, we talk a lot about self-care. To me, self-care isn’t a hot bath or a massage; it’s being able to exercise my agency — and that includes advocating for and with the people I support on the street. However, being able to do that effectively requires a solid foundation of knowledge about what policy is, what its systemic influences are, who the decision-makers are, and how to generate solutions or alternatives. And, most importantly, how to win these solutions or alternatives.
While I gleaned some of this knowledge by diving headfirst into policy work — specifically around COVID-19 protocols in my sector, which had no government guidance, and around unsheltered homelessness — I honed it through participation in Maytree Policy School. While policy work can feel detached and sanitized, what I learned was fully applicable to what I wanted to achieve: the implementation of human-rights-driven policy approaches to encampments.
In the absence of accessible, sustainable, healthy housing for everyone — which is the only real solution to homelessness — governments have downloaded the responsibility for housing directly onto homeless people themselves. That’s what an encampment is. And what I learned at Maytree Policy School were more strategic avenues to advocate for the humane treatment of encampment residents.
I’d love to see more front-line workers, as well as people with lived experience, benefit from policy training. I’d also love to see more policy leaders consider the role of people like us in policy work.
Generally, government and decision-makers don’t listen to front-line workers. There’s an assumption that because we work front-line, we don’t have the skillset or intelligence to engage in policy work. I would argue that we are some of the best people to do this work because we know on a very granular level how policy creates barriers for people.
As front-line workers we can relate our work with individuals to institutions, including the agencies that employ us, and make a connection to systemic barriers as well as opportunities for change. Since front-line workers exist as intermediaries — facilitating the processes of housing people, finding them shelter, or connecting them to services and resources, for example — we understand barriers that non-front-line workers can’t.
At the same time, my voice — the voice of a front-line worker — is not the most important one in the room. While we are systematically excluded from policy conversations, so are people with lived experience, which is a far greater failing. In terms of homelessness, considering that people without homes actively bear the brunt of bad policy — which we know has dire implications on their health and well-being, including their life expectancy — it’s egregious that they continue to be excluded.
Policy conversations should always involve those most impacted by those policies to shape solutions and reform. In my world, people who are homeless should be at the table in generating the solutions to homelessness. Yet, it rarely happens — at the systems level, but also within organizations that serve unhoused people.
When consultation with people with lived experience does happen, opportunities for input are both limited and shallow, and rarely do they include any decision-making power. Too often we extract people’s knowledge and insights without seriously considering, let alone implementing, what they’re telling us.
This needs to change.
While it is so important to understand policy work and how to do it well and without causing unintentional harm, we need more opportunities to understand policy, especially for front-line workers and people with lived and living experience. At the same time, we also need reform in how we approach policy and who gets to be involved.
The real world is messy. Many of us are knee-deep, or even drowning, in that messiness. If the policy world is serious about generating relevant solutions to complex issues, isn’t it time that it met us at our level and got a bit messy, too?