Meet Tracy Woodard

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tracy Woodard. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tracy below.

Tracy, thank you so much for making time for us today. We’re excited to discuss a handful of topics with you, but perhaps the most important one is around decision making. The ability to make decisions is a key requirement for anyone who wants to make a difference and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your decision-making skills.
You have to take risks when pulling people out of dark places, which means going *to* the woods or abandoned buildings instead of expecting homeless folks to find you. Sometimes you offer help and they decline because they have gotten to be self-sufficient, but other times I have shown up just in time to help a woman in labor, a youth who couldn’t get home for lack of a phone, or a dementia patient on the ground who was struck mute and couldn’t call 911.

You also have to factor in chaos. Working with the homeless population comes with a guaranteed modicum of uncertainty, whether that’s your ability to offer help, their capacity to receive it, or the various barriers of bureaucracy, which allows for a freedom you wouldn’t enjoy in a better-funded line of work. Some clients lose their phones a lot. Some clients are paranoid and sleep in five different locations. They all want help, but they have their struggles. It keeps you on your toes.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I have worked with the Atlanta homeless population since 1999, building small locking shelters in pre-existing camps and, now acting as a Team Lead with Intown Cares, offering social services such as housing navigation, connection to medical services, and access to our food pantry.

American cities are exploring tiny home communities as a form of emergency housing for the first time ever. It’s really exciting to see what Atlanta might do in the near future.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Be super friendly to everyone. You have something in common with any person you encounter, whether that’s the security guard at the county jail, the Texas lobbyist you want to push down the stairs, or the church lady who knits Christmas hats every year. They all have something interesting to say, and we can all learn from them.

Read the tone of the room, but never be shy about giving people a little education about your job (if they ask). Folks often have a very Walden Pond view of homelessness, assuming that my job is largely unnecessary, and I am quick to deflate that illusion so they understand why the work is so critical.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
“Twenty Years at Hull House” by Jane Addams, hands down a marvelous book on social work a hundred years ago in Chicago, and how very little has changed.

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