Buiza Housing/Homelessness Q2
The critical issues facing this country at the moment has really focused my mind on what it is that we are not doing right? In the immigrant rights movement for example, we have for as long as I can remember talked about the idea of serious “intersectional”/cross sector approach to our work but much of this is not operationalized. We are still very much silo-ed as a social sector.
When I was working at the United Nations, we did a major shift in humanitarian programming by operationalizing the idea of “mainstreaming.” The notion of assessing the different implications for people or sectors of any planned policy action, including legislation and programmes, in all areas and levels, meant that we looked at social problems and their relationship to social programs wholistically. Closer to home, the fight to provide health care to undocumented immigrants for example would not be so fraught if we had mainstreaming in mind when we designed our immigrant integration programs and their interaction with the state’s health care system.
