Stay in Your Lane
By Tabitha Keith, Director of Programs, Heart for Winter Haven
“Stay in your lane.”
It's a phrase I've heard more than once in community work, and I understand the logic behind it. Organizations need focus. We can't all do everything, and trying to solve every problem usually means solving none of them particularly well.
But after years of sitting across the table from families experiencing instability, I've started wondering what happens when the problems themselves refuse to stay in their lanes.
A family comes to us because they're behind on rent. That's housing.
Except they're behind on rent because the car broke down and they started missing work. Now it's transportation.
Their hours were reduced because they couldn't reliably get there. Now it's employment.
There wasn't enough money in savings to repair the car. Now it's financial stability.
Childcare is unreliable, which makes picking up additional hours almost impossible. Stress is affecting the parent's mental health. Relationships are strained. The family has slowly become more isolated, and when everything finally starts falling apart, there isn't much of a support system left to call.
So which lane does that family belong in?
After years of doing this work, I've become convinced that one of the reasons poverty is so difficult to address is that we've become very good at organizing services into categories while people's lives stubbornly refuse to fit inside them.
Transportation affects employment. Employment affects income. Income affects housing. Savings determine whether an emergency becomes a catastrophe. Mental and emotional health affect our ability to navigate all of it. Relationships often determine whether we have anyone to call when life goes sideways.
That doesn't mean Heart for Winter Haven needs to become the transportation provider, the employer, the counselor, the school, the church, the landlord, and the housing provider for every family we meet.
Quite the opposite.
It means we need each other.
Recently, one of the families we work with was facing the kind of housing pressure we're seeing all over our community. Her landlord was increasing rents for other tenants. But something different happened in her case.
Her Care Manager at Heart, Maria Maldonado, had gotten to know her story. Maria knew how hard this woman had worked to stabilize her life, and she also knew what kind of tenant she had been. So Maria advocated for her.
She helped the landlord see what she had been able to see up close: a woman who was working hard, making progress, and doing everything she could to build a more stable life.
The landlord decided not only to leave her rent alone.
She decreased it.
Think about how many “lanes” that crossed.
Maria isn't the landlord. Heart doesn't control what a private property owner charges in rent. The landlord isn't the client's case manager. None of us could have required that outcome.
It happened because of relationship.
The landlord saw the tenant differently because someone who knew her story was willing to advocate for her. The landlord then used something she did have control over to become part of the solution.
That story has stayed with me because I think it captures something important about the kind of community we're trying to build.
What if our greatest opportunity isn't for every organization to expand its lane, but for each of us to become more aware of how our lane connects to someone else's?
A school may notice that a child's family is moving from couch to couch. An employer may have an opportunity that could increase a parent's income. A church may provide relationships and support a family has been missing. A counselor may help someone address what years of instability have done emotionally. A landlord may have the ability to give a good tenant a little breathing room. A nonprofit may know enough of the whole story to help those people find one another.
None of us has to own the whole problem.
But somebody has to see the whole picture.
That's what I believe Heart for Winter Haven is uniquely positioned to do.
Our goal is to help end childhood homelessness in Winter Haven by 2030. I don't believe we'll get there because one organization builds the perfect program or somehow becomes capable of meeting every need. We'll get there because a city learns to recognize how housing, employment, education, finances, relationships, mental health, opportunity, and community affect one another, and then gets better at working together.
Maybe the answer isn't abandoning our lanes altogether.
Maybe it's realizing that our lanes were never supposed to keep us from seeing each other.
One Step to Take This Week
Think about an issue in our community that matters to you. Instead of asking only, “Whose job is this?” try asking a different question:
“What do I have within my reach that could become part of the solution?”
For one landlord, it was the ability to lower a tenant's rent. For Maria, it was a relationship and the willingness to advocate. Neither could have created that outcome alone.
There are things each of us can do exceptionally well, and there are problems none of us were ever meant to solve alone.
What might become possible in Winter Haven if more of us stopped worrying about whose lane the problem belongs in and started asking what part of the solution belongs to us?