When homelessness and social housing workers are too tired to do justice: Why I’ve been trying to rest more for social change

"How would our justice work look different if all involved were not sleep-deprived?"

Tricia Hersey, Rest as Resistance: Free Yourself from Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life, 2022

After more than 20 years of working in homelessness and social housing, I’ve faced an uncomfortable truth: I've been exhausted for over 20 years.

Maybe it's time we think about doing this work differently.

Homelessness and social housing as justice work

When I talk about housing justice work, I mean all the efforts to help people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity – from street outreach to housing management. This work starts from a simple premise: housing is a basic right, and some people need more help than others to have it.

The research is clear on two key points. First, while homelessness could happen to anyone, certain groups face higher risks due to ongoing marginalisation and systemic barriers. Second, the primary driver of homelessness isn't personal – it's housing availability.

Why we choose housing justice work

People choose housing justice work because it matters to us deeply. We care about the people we serve and want to help them build more stable lives.

My own awareness of housing justice work started in my early twenties, with a university placement working with people in rooming houses. Following this, a part-time job at a drop-in centre for women experiencing homelessness led to over two decades in this field – homelessness prevention, street outreach, community housing management, and more.

I've rarely looked back*. Once you see what stable housing can do for someone's life, you can't unsee it. The research confirms what many of us feel: this work provides us with deep meaning and purpose.

What we can’t unsee

There's a flipside to housing justice work. Once you see the harm that housing precarity causes – to physical and mental health, relationships, and identity – you can't unsee that either. You can't ignore how that harm is compounded through hostile policies, punitive approaches to public space, and systems that seem designed to exclude rather than include.

Perhaps most frustratingly, you can't unsee how long we've known that providing housing with optional supports can end homelessness for most people.

Like many housing justice workers, I've experienced burnout repeatedly. It's an occupational hazard driven by the traumatic stories we hear daily and the structural barriers that prevent us from helping as much as we'd like.

I've noticed a pattern in my own experience: When I can help someone, or when I have a reasonable explanation for why I can't, the difficult stories are manageable. The ability to help makes the emotional labour worthwhile. But when I can't help and the reasons feel arbitrary or systemic, that's when burnout hits.

The danger of sprinting a marathon

My early warning signs of burnout are overwork, taking on too much responsibility, and sacrificing sleep. When I’m starting to struggle, I try to run faster.

I remember designing homelessness responses for people seeking asylum with no income options. The hundreds of people we were able to help were crowded out by my anxiety about the thousands we knew we wouldn't be able to help. My knowledge of our limitations began overshadowing my appreciation of what we accomplished. I would wake at 4am to draw flowcharts, designing new projects for the limited resources we had.

If I'd been able to slow down – to gain perspective – I might have recognised the boundaries of what I could reasonably accomplish. I might have allocated my efforts more strategically, focusing on a realistic immediate response while also keeping a reserve for maintaining steady persistence on the longer-term goals of housing justice.

I might have stopped trying to sprint through what was actually a marathon. I might have avoided the inevitable collapse.

Rest as resistance

Today, I am better at prioritising rest. My rest spaces include times of sleep, times of leisure, and times of reflection. In the past week my rest involved a day in bed, reading Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance: Free Yourself from Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life.

Tricia Hersey describes how we are often too tired to do the work that really matters to us: ‘Exhaustion keeps us numb, keeps us zombie-like, and keeps us on the clock.’ Rest, on the other hand, helps us choose to ‘treat ourselves and each other like the tender and powerful beings we are.’

I still encounter trauma in my housing justice work – particularly as I spend more time listening to people with lived experiences of homelessness, whose stories have shown me even more of the unacceptable realities in our systems. But I haven't experienced a full burnout in a long time. I’ve learnt to pull myself back from the edges when I see them. I’ve learnt to recover much more quickly.

A different way forward

The housing crisis demands long-term solutions and sustained advocacy. It probably requires us to consider some hard truths about what isn’t working in the homelessness and social housing sectors. It requires that housing justice leaders model the kind of care and humanity we want to see in all of our systems.

Being rested has helped my housing justice work. It has helped me to be a better listener, more considerate in how I choose my actions, and even more persistent in my work towards social change.

*Except for the time that I almost became a maths teacher. Feel free to contact to ask me about how preparing myself to be a maths teacher also changed my approach to housing justice work.

Bibliography

Aubry, T., Bloch, G., Brcic, V., Saad, A., Magwood, O., Abdalla, T., Alkhateeb, Q., Xie, E., Mathew, C., Hannigan, T., Costello, C., Thavorn, K., Stergiopoulos, V., Tugwell, P., & Pottie, K. (2020). Effectiveness of permanent supportive housing and income assistance interventions for homeless individuals in high-income countries: a systematic review. The Lancet Public Health, 5(6), e342-e360. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(20)30055-4

Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. (2024). What does ‘housing as a human right’ mean in Australia? https://www.ahuri.edu.au/analysis/brief/what-does-housing-human-right-mean-australia

Australian Human Rights Commission. (2008). Homelessness is a Human Rights Issue. https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/rights-and-freedoms/publications/homelessness-human-rights-issue

Aykanian, A., & Mammah, R. O. (2022). Prevalence of adverse childhood experiences among frontline homeless services workers in Texas. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 103(4), 438-449. https://doi.org/10.1177/10443894211063579

Bell, K., & Allain, J. (2021). Homelessness and human rights in Australia. In Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Law in Australia (pp. 241-267). Thomson Reuters.

Carver, H., Price, T., Falzon, D., McCulloch, P., & Parkes, T. (2022). Stress and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic: A mixed-methods exploration of frontline homelessness services staff experiences in Scotland. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(6), 3659. https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/6/3659

Colburn, G., & Aldern, C. (2022). Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns. University of California Press.

Community Housing Industry Association Victoria (2023). Victorian Community Housing Workforce
Strategy (2023-2025). https://chiavic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Victorian-Community-Housing-Workforce-Strategy-2023-2025-FINAL.pdf

Cooper, V., & McCulloch, D. (2023). Homelessness and mortality: An extraordinary or unextraordinary phenomenon? Mortality, 28(2), 220-235. https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2023.2176214

Gabriel, M. D. (2023). Our home is native land: Teachings, perspectives, and experiences of Indigenous houselessness. Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social Economy Research, suppl. SPECIAL ISSUE, 14, 89-105. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.29173/cjnser574

Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is Resistance. Aster.

James, A., D. Dunlop, P., Gilbert, C., Gilbert, J., Gagné, M., Parsell, C., Cawthray, J., & Muhammad Farid, H. (2023). Investigative panel into building and retaining an effective homelessness sector workforce. AHURI Final Report (409). https://doi.org/10.18408/ahuri8128901

Lemieux-Cumberlege, A. H., Griffiths, H., Pathe, E., & Burley, A. (2024). Posttraumatic stress disorder, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout in frontline workers in homelessness services: risk and protective factors. Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness, 33(2), 329-340. https://doi.org/10.1080/10530789.2023.2191405

Mayock, P. (2023). (Re)assembling the self: Homeless young people’s identity journeys and the search for ontological security. Child Care in Practice, 29(3), 297-318. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/13575279.2023.2199191

Owadally, T., & Grundy, Q. (2023). From a criminal to a human-rights issue: Re-imagining policy solutions to homelessness. Policy, Politics, & Nursing Practice, 24(3), 178-186. https://doi.org/10.1177/15271544231176255

Parsell, C. (2023). Homelessness. Polity.

Parsell, C., Perales, F., Kuskoff, E., Stambe, S., & Plage, S. (2023). Permanent supportive housing: A ten-year study of entries and exits. Life Course Centre Working Paper Series. https://doi.org/10.14264/c46109d

Ritholtz, S. (2023). Is queer-and-trans youth homelessness a form of displacement? A queer epistemological review of refugee studies’ theoretical borders. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 46(9), 1854-1876. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2022.2099747

Swayne, M. R. E., Calzo, J. P., Felner, J. K., & Megan Welsh, C. (2023). Developing evidence for building sanitation justice: A multi methods approach to understanding public restroom quantity, quality, accessibility, and user experiences. PLoS One, 18(7). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288525

Tate, A., Edwards, K., Holmes, N., Buffer, S., Fusfeld, Z., Baronet, W., & Frasso, R. (2022). ‘Even a smile helps’: Exploring the interactions between people experiencing homelessness and passersby in public spaces. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 68(3), 525-532. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020764021989385

Tseris, E., Brasser, E., Tully, S., Jackson, M., & Ferguson, L. (2023). “Housing is such a major part of someone’s life”: Mental health social work practice in the context of a housing affordability crisis. Social Work in Mental Health, 21(1), 46-66. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/15332985.2022.2064204

Twis, M., Petrovich, J., Cronley, C., Nordberg, A., & Woody, D. (2023). Trauma and powerlessness among people experiencing homelessness: Implications for administrative practice. Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance, 47(2), 137-147. https://doi.org/10.1080/23303131.2022.2159907

United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. (n.d.). Info Note: Homelessness and Human Rights (A/HRC/31/54)

Queensland Council of Social Services (2024). State of the Sector Report 2024. https://www.qcoss.org.au/publication/report-state-of-the-sector-2024/

Wood, L., Schrag, R. V., McGiffert, M., Brown, J., & Backes, B. (2023). “I felt better when I moved into my own place”: Needs and experiences of intimate partner violence survivors in rapid rehousing. Violence Against Women, 29(6-7), 1441-1466. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012221117600

Yamada, M. (2022). The role of homeless shelter workers: A study of staff serving homeless veterans. Journal of Applied Social Science, 16(1), 17-30. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/19367244211069950