Staying the course

 The holiday season
 Written by,  Sharleen Cainer, BSW RSW
There are many avenues that can lead a person into homelessness.

Staying the course, giving up, going off into the great abys where a poor decision leads to a bad outcome and a poor outcome becomes a leader into another bad decision. Things are then galloping into an uncontrollable financial, personal, relationship mess. Where do we go from there or what do we do?

We are born with 3 attributes that define ourselves: resilience, personality, and character. Resiliency is documented as a prime indicator of our ability to remain mentally healthy, to bounce back from a disaster. Personal disasters are also are a marker or challenge to our ability to succeed.

Many extremely successful people have suffered many personal or financial disasters.  Jeff Bezos started a company in his garage called Cadabra, after his parents loaned him $250,000.  He gained a few other investors after a convincing sales pitch where he told everybody there was a 30% chance of success. Cadabra then became an online bookstore. Mr. Bezos then decided to name it after a river, Amazon. Mr. Bezos is now the richest man in the world, weighing in at 163.6 billion a year.  You might feel that if you had a parent that was going to invest ¼ million into your impending success, you would also be quite rich and famous. Well, maybe yes, and then again maybe not.

Mr. Bezos worked on Wall Street in New York. He became aware early in 2000's that internet businesses were flourishing while the same annual growth was not evident in other financial avenues. He set up his business to ride the Ecommerce wave. His vision and his problem-solving skills propelled him forward.  Long gone are the days when he was sitting in his garage plotting the success of an online book store business while conventional businesses met their demise.

Another inspirational individual, Jal Jok became a child soldier somewhere at around 7yrs of age. He, along with other children escaped and became involved with a British Aid worker, by the name of Emma McCune. This dedicated young worker smuggled a young Jal Jok into Kenya and he eventually came to Canada. He became the poster child for the story War Child. But on a personal note, he aspired to be a hip hop artist as EmmanuelJal. He amassed a large following and became remarkably successful.  You might be feeling that you would never have survived with your mind intact had you been forced to be a soldier at such a young age. Well, maybe not but then again, maybe.

EmmanuelJal is very insightful while talking about suffering; how he has run from one place to another. With each episode of suffering, a resolution awaits. With each resolution another set of circumstances arises that brings a new heightened intensity of suffering and then again, the resolution. The past can not be changed, the future is unknown. What you can be in control of is the present.  What do these two Iconic heroes have in common? Resilience, vision, problem-solving strategies, and self-reliance.

Institutionalization, the antithesis of self-reliance, will diminish an individual's ability to resolve their issues and expand their ability to problem solve, therefore becoming a gateway to homelessness. Hospitals discharge, with little attention of where too. Jails release with little thought of where too. Children's Aid, discharges, with a sanitized term called "aged out", and little thought as to where too. To resolve a crisis, one must be able to conceptualize the problem, then create the solution. Note where you came from, how you got here, where are you going from here, and how will you get there?

Indigenous people have been institutionalized since the arrival of the Europeans. Institutionalizing the Native inhabitants was necessary for European land ownership, which lead to the subsequent homelessness of the Indigenous. The residential schools separated the children from families and culture, leaving them to struggle with who they were, how they got into that torturous situation and how they were going to escape from it. Dominated as defenseless children, Indigenous youth struggled to conceptualize solutions. The concept of institutionalization has many arms, like an octopus.  Each arm has the same agenda, to dominate the spirit of an individual so as to ensure the compliance to policy. We have lost sight of the fact that "policy" is an ever-changing concept that shifts with the flow of the political pendulum. If you are sceptical on that think back to WW11 era, when in an address to the nation, it was deemed by the Prime Minister of Canada that one Jew in Canada was one Jew too many.  Think back to the days of slavery when it was policy that allowed the Prime Minister of Canada to own a slave. Policy changes because of public opinion. The role of institutions changes because of public opinion. Go Public, shelter the unsheltered.