Series with Aaron Munro #2: The Difference between Managing Mental Health Programs and Disrupting Them.

After 17 years working in Vancouver Canada’s Downtown Eastside, Aaron Munro’s highly unique and courageous ideas have been studied by mental health systems all over the world and are now being discussed as more humane practices for refugee camps. In our second episode, Aaron guides us through a multitude of relational practices he learned from the homeless people he works with that led him to purposefully challenge and disrupt former taken for granted ideas about ‘professional’ relationships with homeless people and managing homeless shelters.

Excerpt from Aaron’s soon to be published book Bad Manners:

“With another man, Stephen, who is exactly the same age as me, I also had an altercation during this period. He wasn’t allowed in the building and I remember once running through the hallway to escape him. He would later become one of the people who I grew closest to throughout my time in this field. But that’s a story to be told later. I will tell you that he was attacked with a machete and seriously injured while sleeping in an SRO. Yet another young man Michael advocated for Stephen to be allowed in the building to have a safe place to heal. Michael gathered a group of young men who lived in the building and stood up to us workers. They said that if we didn’t allow Stephen in, they would evict us. Amazing, hey? It was probably my first lesson about what it means to be really against un-housedness, not just for yourself, not to make your life more comfortable, but for the whole community. We thought we were ending un-housedness, but Michael’s group enacted real commitment. This lesson I hold dear.”