Program Manager, The Renewal House

My name is Marlene Moore-Collins, I am a LMSW. Right now I am a program manager for the Renewal House, which is a homeless transition program for persons 58 and older. So what we do, is we work on a holistic view. They come into our program and if they need housing, if they need any help with transportation, they need help accessing all the medical information and stuff as far as physicals and visits and stuff they might need. We do all of that. So what we do is once they arrive into our program, there's an interview process, which is a four step process and once they are accepted, I am the case worker and the manager so I actually sit down with them, and we go through whatever roadblocks they've come across. I meet with each client once a week for an hour. So that would be over their specific needs. But I also meet with them as a group because the resident, the house that we work at, we have six residents. And I am the program manager, the case manager and I have an executive director so basically I kinda just run the house. Everybody has to kind of like form as a community. So they have to eat dinner together every day. They take turns cooking. We grocery shop together. We encourage them to help each other, as such a family where you have someone that may be strong, in some areas and someone may not be. So we encourage them to help each other. I understand what it is to be without. I understand working hard when you're constantly constantly in survival mode. That's hard to think past that. So I explain to them that my job is is to get them past that survival mode.