Rejecting Wraparound Support: An Ethnographic Study of Social Service Provision

Agency in advanced liberal services: grounding sociological knowledge in homeless people's accounts

“…The shelter is state funded, and operated by a large not‐for‐profit organization. Details of the Gain shelter are described in‐depth elsewhere (Parsell, Stambe and Baxter ), including the shelter's practices of employing university qualified social workers to deliver the Gain Model.…”

“…Consistent with advanced liberal critiques of welfarism, the Gain Model posits that contemporary wraparound models of social services have pacifying effects that undermine autonomy (Parsell, Stambe and Baxter ). According to the Gain Model, wraparound support positions service users as deficient and has low expectations of their capacity to improve their situations.…”

“…The model assumes that ‘people need to deal with the consequences of their choices as necessary to realise the good life. Implicit in the model is an assumption that telling people how to act is counterproductive as doing so subverts autonomy’ (Parsell, Stambe and Baxter ).…”

“…Importantly, the advanced liberal practices deployed at Gain differ from what many scholars see as the dominant ‘neoliberal’ approach to social service provision (Soss, Fording and Schram ; Woolford and Nelund ). First, even though Gain's ultimate aim is to overcome what it perceives as dependence on social services, it ‘Differ[s] from neoliberal tenets’ in that it ‘assumes that well‐resourced social services are required to disrupt deep exclusion and dependence’ (Parsell, Stambe and Baxter ). Indeed, the Gain Model challenges a mode of social service practice (i.e., wraparound support) rather than the need for social services per se .…”

“…Developed by Sam Tsemberis in New York City in the early 1990s, the Housing First approach has been embraced internationally as an evidenced housing solution to homelessness that offers people choice in the housing they occupy and the support services they receive (Padgett, Henwood and Tsemberis, ). Notwithstanding the principle of choice driving Housing First, the approach differs from the Gain Model in that the latter rejects the former's practices of continued formal support services and the need to be a programme client to access ongoing housing (Parsell, Stambe and Baxter ).…”