Friendship House, which first opened its doors as a thrift store to benefit the local community of those experiencing homelessness in the winter of 1986, has grown into a nonprofit organization based in Wilmington and serving all those experiencing homelessness and/or need in the state of Delaware. Though just a store at the very beginning, they became a 24-hour resource to the community, especially for those seeking shelter from the cold. In the spring of 1987, Friendship House was forced to close until it was fully licensed as a shelter. As Friendship House had already gained some recognition at this point, several local church communities became co- sponsors, and along with Meeting Ground–a similar organization based in Maryland–, Friendship House, Inc. registered as an official Delaware nonprofit corporation. The thrift store never reopened, but it was replaced with an elaborate network of programs and services aimed to serve the homeless population of Delaware. Today, Friendship House has just under 40 employees who work in Administration, at the Clothing Bank, at the Hope Center (a temporary emergency shelter), in each of the 12 transitional houses, and at the Empowerment Centers, as well as over 1,000 volunteers. Additionally, Friendship House conducts “Code Purple”, which is when a local church will open its doors for those living on the street to receive dinner and a place to spend the night when the temperature dips below 20º F. The people that work in each of these programs often give their time to more than one, creating a strongly connected network of support for all those in Delaware in need of help.

There are four empowerment centers total, with two in Wilmington, one in Middletown, and one in Newark. I am interning at the Newark location located in the Newark United Methodist Church on Main Street. Each of the empowerment centers are daytime offices that maintain direct contact with their respective local homeless population and offer services and assistance to those experiencing financial need. The centers offer services including basic hospitality, such as hot coffee, water, and restrooms, access to a phone or computer, a mailing address, and case management appointments which can include financial assistance, submitting requests for birth certificates and IDs, bus passes, referrals to AA/NA meetings, taking clothing orders, and supplying food items and other additional necessities to those who need them. Above all, the empowerment centers are a resource for those in the community to receive assistance however they may need it and find true kindness and open-mindedness in those who work there. Often, people really just want to come in and talk, and the staff are there to listen.

Friendship House, as mentioned, is a very small organization, with most employees working numerous positions at once, even at more than one or two locations per day. Employees have to be prepared for whatever walks through the door each day, and they have to be ready to approach it with the intent of helping the client in some way. Additionally, the lack of staff requires each location to have multiple volunteers to be able to operate while the caseworker(s) talk to the clients. The result is that everyone, from the caseworker to the intern to all the volunteers, has to be capable of making decisions and moving forward without running everything by a higher up. This has created a culture of an incredible amount of trust in each other and a sense of independence in oneself. Caseworkers hardly have time to train new volunteers every single day, so volunteers are simply expected to come in and do their best at meeting the needs of clients, asking questions where they feel they must. And administrators don’t have time to approve every single $200 money order to cover someone's utility bill, so the general atmosphere of the organization is that if you are operating with kindness and graciousness with intent to help a client, then do what you think is right, and if it was wrong, someone will give you a heads up later. This originally made it much more difficult for me to connect with my work; I did not feel ready to come into a position basically as a caseworker in training but without any of the training. I thought that I should be told how to interact with clients before just jumping into a financial analysis and asking them why they couldn't afford to pay their bills. I didn't know how much food or toiletries I was allowed to give away, and I didn't have a proper understanding of the budget to know how much we could afford to help. However, I quickly came to understand that time toward training interns is time taken away from working with clients, and that so long as I was making each decision with compassion and common sense, I wouldn't really have to worry about making mistakes. I feel very connected to my work now, in that I feel I learned how to fulfill the role on my own using values and experience that I already had.

My internship schedule is 12:30-4:30 every Tuesday and Friday from January 11th through the end of the spring semester. When I arrive, the first order of business is lunch. Every day, Monday through Friday, the center hands out hot meals from 1:15-2:00. There are almost always volunteers there to help with lunch, so my responsibility is to direct the volunteers, offer a hand, and make sure everything is ready to go by 1:15 when the doors open. In addition to hot meals, we stock up on go-bags (Ziplock bags with a source of protein, various snacks, and a drink with intention of functioning as a meal), as well as socks, gloves, hats, handwarmers, water bottles, granola bars, toiletries, and we serve hot coffee. The meal for each day depends on the donations that the center receives, but generally, Tuesdays we get pizza donated from a local pizza restaurant, and Fridays we hand out ham sandwiches with chips and cookies. As people come to the door, we get their name, give them lunch, and ask them what else we can get for them. Originally, clients would just come to the door because of COVID regulations, but now, people are allowed to come inside and sit so they can be served and talk with each other for an hour or two inside. There are a handful of regulars who come almost every day, so part of the daily responsibilities include chatting with them, and if there are new people, we talk to them to try and find out what their situation is and how we can be of help to them. When lunch is over, we clean up, and then begin taking appointments at 2. Clients currently call ahead to make appointments due to COVID, and when they come in, they will sit down with either Kelly, another caseworker, or myself and we will fill out a Client Interaction Log on NewOrg detailing their situation and how we are helping them. Most appointments are financial assessments, wherein clients will come in with a bill they need help paying. We’ll talk to them about why they’re struggling right now, scan their bill and their ID into NewOrg, and then if we are able to help them, we contact the company to let them know that we are making a payment for the client. Each client can only be helped financially once a year, and the most they can receive from the center is $200, but if their bill is higher than that, we will help them get set up on a payment plan or direct them to other organizations that also offer financial assistance. The people making those appointments usually do have housing, and we try and help them keep it. Those experiencing homelessness often make appointments to request their birth certificate so that they can apply for jobs, housing, etc. In the beginning, I mostly shadowed Kelly when she conducted appointments so that I could learn how to conduct them myself, but when we are especially busy, I would work with the clients directly, too. Now, I am more experienced with clients, and can usually handle appointments for utility bills on my own. My other main responsibilities between 2 and 4 each day include creating Client Interaction Logs for everyone who visited the center for lunch and answering and returning calls usually to schedule appointments. It’s important that we record when clients come to visit, and what they need on that day so that we can keep track of them and know how they are doing, and I also help with the phones because since my one supervisor Josh resigned midsemester, the office has regularly been understaffed. I believe I have been of great assistance to the Empowerment Center, and that my skills were used as efficiently as possible, but I am one of many interns this semester, and one of many more that have interned in the past or will in the future. So, I am not sure the impact that I specifically had on the future of the organization, but the assistance of unpaid interns is essential to the success of the organization. They need the help, but don’t have the resources at their disposal to pay for more employees. However, I hope that my interactions with individual clients over the past 5 months will assist those people in getting back on their feet, which is what the real goal of Friendship House is.

While my project does not have a direct impact on public policy, I am able to see close up how public policies impact the organization and the people they are trying to help. One of the most striking examples of this is the process for acquiring one’s birth certificate. The first question we ask a client when they come in for a birth certificate is what state they were born in, and their answer means a lot for how we proceed next and what our likelihood of success is. For example, it’s easiest to get the birth certificate of someone born in Delaware, but it’s nearly impossible to convince New York to provide a copy. Additionally, people coming in for their birth certificate often also need an ID and a social security card. However, they can’t get their birth certificate without their ID, and they can’t get their social security card or their ID without having the other, as well as a home address, which many of them don’t have. And identification and social security is required to get a job, but an income is required to find housing in most cases. One other interesting policy I learned about in my time with Friendship House is that while power companies will send out shut-off notices to customers who are late on their bill, they are not actually allowed to shut off power in the state of Delaware during the winter. There are a number of other policies that impact the center and the organization, but it has been eye-opening to see how complicated those policies make it for someone to build their way back up again, and to see how nonprofits such as Friendship House sometimes have to use tricks of the trade to get around obstacles set in place against their cause.

This experience will impact my future academic career and longer-term career plans by forming the basis of my understanding of how nonprofits operate at the ground level. It has helped inform me of the role I am most suited to play in a nonprofit. For instance, I was pretty sure going into the internship that I would be attracted more to administrative work than to the work of an individual caseworker. Administrators in small nonprofits such as Friendship House not only handle their organizational duties, but also fill in where they are needed. One of my favorite people to work with was Marc Marcus, the Assistance Executive Director, who handled the operations of all of Friendship House’s branches, but when I worked with him, he was assisting as a caseworker. Part of what has attracted me to nonprofits is the potential for wearing several hats and working many different roles. I believe I have more to offer to an organization than the confines of a job title, and I want to be able to challenge myself to be of service in a variety of ways. Marc is an excellent example of this: he goes wherever he is most needed. Additionally, this internship position showed me how interested I am in the policy side of nonprofit work. I did not get to see much of it in my role, but I was able to feel the impacts of the policies already in place, and I, too, was frustrated by the obstacles they created. I can only imagine how beneficial it will be to my future policy endeavors to remember the impact policy can have on the people at the lower levels of nonprofits who are just trying to help in whatever way they can.