Sojourners, Not Cases

On building the Warm Handoff Project — and the months I spent unhoused while running the youth programs that would shape the rest of my career

My first job out of seminary was at Faith in Place. I was doing environmental justice work I believed in, running youth programs across Lake County, building the kind of career a Master of Public Ministry is supposed to lead to.

I was also unhoused.

My employer knew. They weren't in the dark about it. They were deeply committed to having someone serve the region while living in it, and there was no letting up on the expectation that I relocate there, even though I might have found housing faster if I'd looked elsewhere. Lake County housing is limited, and hard to qualify for when you're still rebuilding a savings account from nothing. So for three months, I ran youth programs in Lake County by day, and bounced couch to couch in the western suburbs by night, until a board member made a personal referral and I found a place in an affluent community just outside Waukegan, further from affordable than most of the families I was serving could reach.

I want to be careful here, because my gratitude is bigger than my gripe. Faith in Place could have passed on me entirely and hired someone already living in the region. They didn't. They took a chance on me, and that opportunity forever changed my trajectory. It's a large part of how my identity as an ecowomanist and my commitment to ecojustice got solidified in the first place. I don't tell this story to shame them. I tell it because of the gap it revealed, and the gap is the useful part: an organization can be genuinely good, genuinely mission-driven, and still not have the infrastructure to catch a staff member before a need becomes a crisis. Faith in Place wasn't a problem organization. They simply didn't have a resource binder sitting in HR — a set of housing connections, benefits, and community referrals ready to hand a new hire before three months on a couch became necessary. That's especially true for organizations built around remote or regional staff, where "we need you to live there" and "we have the infrastructure to help you land there" don't automatically travel together.

I don't say any of this for shock value. I say it because it's the fact that makes everything else I built afterward make sense. The line between "stable" and "one crisis away" is a lot thinner, and a lot less visible, than most organizations assume. You can't always tell by looking at someone. You often can't tell by their résumé, their degree, their job title, or their tone of voice in a meeting. I know that, because that was me.

So when my next job put me in the room to build something new — Program Manager for the Warm Handoff Project at NIRCO, a peer-led, peer-driven recovery community organization (the first of its kind in the area) — I didn't come to that work as an outside expert studying a population. I came to it as someone who had just finished being counted among the very people the program existed to serve. My lived experience wasn't a footnote on my qualifications. It was the qualification.

The first thing I wanted to change was the language.

Every system I'd ever moved through — treatment programs, housing programs, recovery programs — had its own vocabulary for the people passing through it: client. Case. Individual. Words built for filing, not for people. Words that flatten a person into a data point the moment they walk through the door. I knew from the inside what that language does. It doesn't just describe a person's situation, it starts to define how they're treated inside it, and eventually, how they see themselves.

So when we built the Warm Handoff Project, we built the language, first. We called the people we served Sojourners — honoring the sacred nature of the journey, not just the crisis that started it. Navigators. Wayfinders. People charting a way forward, and not, merely people to be processed. It wasn't a branding exercise. It was a theological one. Words shape reality. If the system was ever going to treat someone with dignity, it needed a vocabulary that assumed dignity in the first place.

And the assumption underneath most of that old vocabulary needed dismantling too. The quiet, unspoken idea that "the homeless" has one face, one story, and one set of causes needed reconstructing. In the work I did, I sat across from graduate students between leases and paychecks. I sat across from women who had just left domestic violence situations they could not survive staying in one more night — women with full-time jobs, women with children, women who had never touched a substance in their life and never would. I sat across from people navigating neurodiversity, veterans and elders managing injuries, and individuals facing mental health challenges that made it difficult to navigate paperwork and systems on their own. They are not the whole picture, and treating them as the whole picture is exactly how a system starts serving a stereotype instead of a person.

One of the moments I carry from that work: a woman transitioning out of a domestic violence recovery home, handed a three-day hotel voucher and no clear next step. Our team didn't just refer her somewhere and move on. We drove her to her next safe stay ourselves. While I went inside to confirm the details of her placement, our Peer Recovery Specialist stayed outside with her; because, in that moment, what she needed most wasn't paperwork, it was someone standing next to her while she waited. We helped her carry her belongings so she didn't have to feel the weight of starting over alone. We walked her to the door, and she rang the bell with someone beside her, not behind her.

She has since secured full-time employment. She is working toward permanent housing. She showed up to one of our community events afterward — not as a case that had been closed, but as a neighbor who'd found her footing and came back to be part of the room.

That's what a warm handoff is. Not a transfer of paperwork from one system to the next. It's a refusal to let anyone walk through a doorway alone.

Here's why I'm telling you this.

I built the Warm Handoff Project's language and structure the same way I now walk into every organization I consult with: assuming that the words a system uses on its intake forms, in its staff meetings, and in its data reports are never neutral. They are either building dignity or quietly eroding it. An organization can have the right mission statement and still be running the wrong vocabulary underneath it: case instead of Sojourner, client instead of neighbor — and not even notice, because the language has become so routine it stops sounding like a choice.

And it's not only the language. It's the infrastructure underneath the language — whether an organization is set up to catch its own people before the need becomes a crisis, or only after. That resource binder I wish had existed for me is exactly the kind of thing that never makes it onto a strategic plan, because most organizations only discover they need it in hindsight, the way Faith in Place, NIRCO and I discovered it together. Good intentions don't build that infrastructure by themselves. Someone has to go looking for the gap on purpose.

I find that language, and I find that gap. I name both. And then we build something more honest — and more prepared — in their place.

LaSheena T. Jenkins is the founder of LTJ LLC, offering Strategic Organizational & Prophetic Counsel to churches, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations.