Christine George, Jennifer Nargang Chernega, Sarah Stawiski, Anne Figert and Arturo Valdivia Bendixen
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the nation's first hospital to housing for homeless individuals. The Chicago Housing for Health Partnership (CHHP), a Housing First and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the nation's first hospital to housing for homeless individuals. The Chicago Housing for Health Partnership (CHHP), a Housing First and Harm Reduction model, creates a new comprehensive system of health care, housing and supportive services.
Design/methodology/approach
The researchers conducted a year long process evaluation of the housing program using a multi‐method approach, which involved qualitative interviews, focus groups, document analysis and observations. The paper examined the CHHP system at three different levels (the administrative, service provision and the client levels).
Findings
The study allowed the organizational participants the ability to better understand their program by visually modeling the system for the first time and documenting its effectiveness. It also furthered the understanding of how and why the housing first model is best accompanied by a harm reduction approach. Finally, the paper was able to show how and why organizational system design is important in creating the most effective environment in which programs have a real impact.
Originality/value
The authors were able to help CHHP program leaders conduct strategic planning and to present their program as an effective model future funding agencies and to policy makers. CHHP has incorporated the recommendations into their permanent model. In addition, the CHHP leadership, in a network with other Housing First advocates, has disseminated the findings at national conferences and networking meetings. The authors' relationship with CHHP will continue with the design of a second stage research strategy in order to continue research on Harm Reduction Housing and policy advocacy.
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Keywords
Mary Gatta and Kevin P. McCabe
The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue on “the ‘new’ policy partnership”.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue on “the ‘new’ policy partnership”.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper highlights the significance of policy‐academic partnerships and outlines the papers included in this issue.
Findings
It is important to form and maintain partnerships and collaborations with new nontraditional stakeholders. One place where this is evident is in academia.
Originality/value
The special issue includes original articles that address innovative ways in which researchers and policy makers can collaborate to move policy agendas forward.
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Keywords
The papers in this collection address a set of important issues facing our discipline. These issues cross national boundaries, and indeed are important far beyond the sociological…
Abstract
The papers in this collection address a set of important issues facing our discipline. These issues cross national boundaries, and indeed are important far beyond the sociological sphere. My brief comments here will use these papers as a springboard for noting several important curricular challenges and trends for sociology, in particular, and academia, more generally, as we enter the next century.
This paper is the initial published report of an ongoing research project focused on the occupational world and culture of the real-estate developer.1Data sources include…
Abstract
This paper is the initial published report of an ongoing research project focused on the occupational world and culture of the real-estate developer. 1 Data sources include intensive interviews with (mostly) California developers and associated occupational groups (e.g. architects, planners), participant observation of developer-oriented workshops and conferences, and diverse publications including: (1) the work of social science colleagues who have dealt – sometimes directly, mostly tangentially, with the topic; (2) biographies and autobiographies of contemporary and historic individuals who are “captured” by my classificatory scheme, that is, who I can clearly categorize as being in the development business or who are, at minimum, fellow travellers; (3) newspaper articles, columns, and op-ed pieces dealing with individual developers, with development projects and with support of or opposition to either; (4) social histories which capture the “who did what and when” details of growth and patterning of specific human settlements; (5) information available on the internet (and there is a great deal of it) dealing with both individual developers and with developer-related organizations; (6) publications (newsletters, journals, and so forth) of organizations which either directly represent or are enmeshed with or are in opposition to this occupational group; and (7) fictional works (films, short stories, TV, novels, newspaper and magazine cartoons, etc.) in which one or more of the characters is a developer.1 It is perhaps not surprising that this first report should deal with matters of symbolism, of imagery: As a self-identified symbolic interactionist and, more tellingly perhaps, as a student of Anselm Strauss, 2 Strauss’ Images of the American City (1961) and his edited, The American City: A Sourcebook of Urban Imagery (1968) were among the first works I encountered by him and they continue to be major influences on my thinking about urban matters of all sorts.2 these are the sort of issues that come most readily to mind whenever I am surveying data on almost any phenomenon. And while there are many, many other “stories” to be told about this occupation, I think it is fair to assert that all of them – or at least those dealing with the contemporary situation – will have to be understood against the backdrop of what I have come to think of as the developers’ “image problem.”
In what follows, I will first, overview my rationale for undertaking this study; second, provide some data to support the claims made by the title of the piece, i.e. that developers are seen as villains and that theirs is reasonably captioned a “stigmatized occupation” and then offer other data to question the accuracy of that image; third, propose a triplet of (among, undoubtedly, many other) reasons for this apparent mis-match between image and “reality”: and finally, in a concluding section, speculate a bit about consequences of this occupational stigmatization.