FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN SERVICES
program evaluation, 2023
CLIENT: House Everyone STL, housing and homelessness organization in St. Louis, Missouri
STAKEHOLDERS: Staff and volunteers working with people without homes
GOAL: Evaluate and understand volunteer training processes in housing organizations across St. Louis to improve the quality of services provided via well-trained volunteers.
PROCESS: In this project, we used community-based inquiry to learn from those with intimate experience working in homeless shelters and housing organizations about the skills volunteers must master to be successful in their roles working with people without homes. This model of inquiry posits the stakeholders as co-designers, rather than sources to extract information from. By working with one of the key stakeholders, we were able to clearly define the problem House Everyone STL aimed to solve and agreed on four essential goods integral to homeless shelter volunteer success: care, access, safety, and equity. Our team then worked collaboratively with stakeholders via interviews to learn more about each good and the implications it had on volunteer work in shelters. The data created in these interviews allowed us to begin modeling how the four goods could be trained in a simple but effective way. Through exhaustive coding of our data and modeling our data as many ways as possible, we were able to break down each core good into progressively more specific topics. The goal of organizing the information this way was to simplify and distill topics as much as possible to avoid industry jargon, complicated explanations, and lengthy, unengaging training materials. Each topic was limited to five sentences that aimed to simply define the concept, elaborate on the definition, and describe an example, using direct quotes from our interviews wherever possible. Finally, the four common goods and their respective subtopics were organized into a Prezi to help visually guide a volunteer through the skills and ideas they needed to master in their work.
OUTCOME: We created a training program that prepared participants to work in organizations and communities who provide outreach, shelter, housing, and other supportive services.
