photo by Anna Hernik
A key element of our work at the Housing First Poland Foundation is our weekly, a few hours long team meetings. These meetings provide space to discuss both ongoing organizational matters and the current progress and challenges in our work with participants.
The first part of each meeting focuses on organizational issues. Each week we address different topics, such as the qualification of new participants, the operation of our email counseling service (this service is dedicated to individuals experiencing housing difficulties or broader life challenges who are seeking support), and upcoming events (including conferences, webinars, and study visits) that our team plans to attend.
The second part of the meeting takes the form of peer consultation and centers on our direct work with participants. We discuss the course of work with the participants over the past week, participants’ current goals, their strengths and challenges in achieving those goals, and the support strategies we are implementing. The rest of the team then shares observations and professional insights, offering suggestions in situations that require additional reflection. When we encounter more complex difficulties, we decide to bring a given case to our next supervision session, which we treat as an integral and complementary element of maintaining the quality of our work.
Regularly discussing participants’ situations as a team is very valuable. Our team members
have professional experience in various fields and work within different therapeutic approaches – including solution-focused therapy, psychodynamic therapy, and integrative therapy. This diversity allows us to complement one another’s perspectives and provide more comprehensive support.
This model also ensures continuity of care. Because all team members are familiar with each participant’s situation, in the event of a longer absence, another team member can temporarily step in and provide adequate, consistent support without compromising quality.
In situations where one support worker is temporarily replaced by another, keeping an internal database of participants is helpful. In the database, we record all contacts with participants (in person at the participant’s home, in person at other locations, e.g. external support institutions, by telephone, etc.), as well as discussions about participants at each team meeting and periodic discussions about longer periods of work with participants. The database has a fixed structure, i.e. we always record what type of contact took place, how long it lasted, whether it was initiated by the support worker or the participant, whether the support worker or the participant determined the main topic of the contact, as well as what happened during the contact, what the participant’s current goals are, what their strengths and weaknesses are in achieving these goals, and what the support worker’s action plan is; in the case of contacts in the participant’s home, we also describe the condition of the participant’s home. Collecting all this information is very useful, because it enables us to conduct longitudinal analyses of participants’ well-being and draw conclusions, e.g. about participants’ needs and the effectiveness of our work.