Buddy, can you spare a dime job?
Dear Homeless Hub,
How can a woman with children who is experiencing homelessness look for work?
Rob Evans
Scarborough
Dear Rob,
With great difficulty. And that’s true for all people dealing with homelessness – or even living in poverty – not just women with children. The emergency shelter system and income support systems as a whole can create barriers to employment. At the same time society holds an expectation that people will find work to remove themselves from dependency upon the system.
As a group, people experiencing homelessness tend to have less access to resources and employment opportunities. Sometimes this results from factors that led them into homelessness including a low level of literacy or education, addictions or mental health issues. They may be suffering from trauma or violence experienced at the hands of a family member or partner. Some people have been released from jail into homelessness and have to combat the stigma of both homelessness and incarceration/criminal record.
The challenges to finding work include a lack of access to résumé printing, internet use, transportation and a phone. Not having a permanent address or having an address that is known to be a shelter also can lead to discrimination from employers. Many shelters don’t have enough showers so the ability to look presentable – including good hygiene and appropriate clothing – can be very challenging. As career counsellors always say, “first impressions count for a lot”. For parents with children, as in your question, the ability to find and pay for child-care in both the job search phase and during the first few weeks of employment is often very limited. Having money for transportation, work clothes or a lunch, if successful in finding a job, is also a barrier to full employment.
As a result, some people living in shelters or sleeping rough turn to the “informal economy”. This includes panhandling, busking, squeegeeing, sex work, selling drugs or working under the table in a cash job. When I used to work at a shelter in Oshawa there were often people coming in to hire our residents to help with apple picking and chicken catching.
For more information see our topics on Employment and Employment Training. There are some great tool-kits – the Scottish Homelessness & Employability Tool Kit and Youth Employment: A Practical Tool Kit for Employers and Agencies – that can help organizations improve the odds of someone finding employment. Also, two chapters in our Youth Homelessness in Canada e-book address this topic. In Chapter 15, “Why Don’t You Just Get a Job? Homeless Youth, Social Exclusion and Employment Training”, Steve Gaetz and Bill O’Grady explore the challenges of work for street youth and discuss a framework for developing effective employment programs for youth. In Chapter 17, “It’s Everybody’s Business: Raising the Roof’s Private Sector Engagement Project”, Amanda Noble and Lola Oseni share their strategies for getting the private sector to see the benefits of supporting youth employment.
This post is part of our Friday "Ask the Hub" blog series. Have a homeless-related question you want answered? E-mail us at thehub@edu.yorku.ca and we will provide a research-based answer.