Voluntary Associations,the Homeless and Hard-to-Serve Populations-Perspectives from Organizational Theory

Abstract

In order to assess the role volunteers play and might be expected to play in provision for the homeless and other populations which resist involvement and providing personal information as features of being helped, selected perspectives from organi zational literature are used to: (1) pose the dilemma presented to service providers and programs by these populations; and (2) seek organizational models which might prove appropriate for serving them. Seeking "solutions" in conventional, large-scale programming runs into the dilemma that detailed information flows from the client are necessary to assure accountability, undergird evaluative efforts or even to provide professional service on the one hand, and that unwillingness to provide such information or to comply with routines is a common characteristic of many components of the homeless population on the other. Because the homeless are composed of a number of unlike subpopulations, a typology is suggested to arrange them according to characteristics relevant to the kinds of service organization which might prove effective. The typology is based on whether the service system can provide needed services and whether the client can accept them as provided. Also, general organizational types for conventional service delivery are drawn from Mintzberg and Hasenfeld and English. The idea of mediating institutions which serve to bring the activities of large-scale institutions to a human scale for individu als and to insulate them from undesired involvement with the general society is explored. Forms of organizational experience which might provide models for deal ing with the hard-to-serve are sought in classical charities, counterculture organi zations and providers of emergency services. Hard-to-serve populations emerge as an especially important arena for the efforts of volunteers for a number of reasons: (1) the needs of the clients are concrete and essential and detailed training is not necessary to help them; (2) help is essential to immediate physical survival and must go on whatever the fortunes of more abstract program or policy efforts, making them attractive to those volunteers who prefer direct contact with people helped; (3) because the organizations involved tend to be small, heterogeneous and localized, activity within them presents a broad range of auspices and work appealing to a number of motivations; (4) there is often a direct connection to religious and other institutional areas of the volunteer's life; and (5) because the organizations are small and the activities direct, results are immediately perceptible.