Josephine Ensign

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

” ‘The last thing you own when you’re losing everything you own is probably your vehicle, so that becomes your home.’ Jenn Adams knows this from six years living in her Seattle van starting in 2007. ‘I’ve lived in three different vans and a doorway,’ she said in a recent interview I had with her. She talked about her experience and current work as an advocate and peer outreach worker to vehicle residents in Seattle.

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Josephine Ensign

NOVEMBER 19, 2024

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hopkins Press (@hopkinspress)

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Josephine Ensign

NOVEMBER 10, 2024

Anitra Freeman is a force of nature with an infectious laugh and a sense of humor. Freeman is a wise elder, a Raging Granny , a founding member of the Women in Black in Seattle, a housing/homelessness activist, a wife, and a computer wiz. Freeman also lives with a form of bipolar disorder and experienced homelessness in Seattle. She is now stably housed and continuously giving back to our community and working to make our city a safer, healthier place for everyone, including people without homes

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Josephine Ensign

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Although only 1% of Seattle’s population identifies as Indigenous, “hundreds of years of colonization, systemic racism, broken treaties, forced reservations, and more have resulted in native peoples making up a startling 15% of Seattle’s homeless population,” as well as 32% of people experiencing chronic homelessness (quote from the Chief Seattle website).

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Josephine Ensign

SEPTEMBER 29, 2024

Dr. Simha Reddy is director of the Puget Sound VA Homeless Patient Aligned Care Team, where, for over the past ten years, he has done healthcare outreach and primary care with veterans experiencing or having experienced the trauma of homelessness in the Seattle area. In addition, he serves on the Implementation Board of King County’s Regional Homelessness Authority and has served on the governing board of the long-running advocacy group, the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness.

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Josephine Ensign

SEPTEMBER 23, 2024

The best part of my job is working alongside smart, dedicated, and compassionate people who make a positive impact on the lives of people experiencing homelessness. People like Hannah Glover. She is a health navigator at the Elizabeth Gregory Home, a day shelter for women and female-identified people in the University District (U District) of Seattle.

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Josephine Ensign

SEPTEMBER 2, 2024

Tim Harris, 2015, Photo credit: Josephine Ensign Tim Harris , founder and longtime director (1994-2020) of Real Change , Seattle’s “street paper” anti-poverty newspaper, talked with me about his life and work in 2015. Real Change turns 30 this year, with the first issue published on August 20, 1994. My purpose with this Skid Road oral history project and podcast is to highlight and celebrate the visionary people in Seattle who have impacted the landscape locally in terms of hou

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Josephine Ensign

AUGUST 27, 2024

In April, I interviewed Seattle-based housing advocate and consultant Ginger Segel. I know a lot about health policy, especially as it relates to care for people experiencing homelessness. I do not know as much about housing policy as I would like to, so I was eager to hear her stories and perspectives. Segel first spoke of how, as a student at Columbia University in NYC, she witnessed the role of the university in displacing low-income people in the expanding area around the university.

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Josephine Ensign

AUGUST 19, 2024

Dr. Ben Danielson, Odessa Brown Clinic, 2015, photo credit: Josephine Ensign I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Ben Danielson when he was the medical director of Seattle Children’s Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic in the Central District. I was a nurse practitioner at the co-located community health clinic, the Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center.

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Josephine Ensign

JULY 23, 2024

I am grateful for the first reviews of my newest book, Way Home: Journeys Through Homelessness , now available for pre-order. Here are the book’s description and the reviews: Can one city’s solutions to homelessness help the United States face the issue nationally? The United States grapples with a solution for the unhoused by employing a patchwork of uneven rhetoric and policy.

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Josephine Ensign

JULY 13, 2024

In the midst of a prolonged heat wave two years ago in July, I talked with Washington State Representative Nicole Macri about her work on homelessness, housing justice, and behavioral health issues. Macri has worked at Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC ) in various capacities for the past twenty-two years. In the Washington State House of Representatives she serves on the Health Care and Wellness Committee.

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Josephine Ensign

NOVEMBER 11, 2023

Yesterday, at a community homelessness resource and health fair where I was faculty preceptor for a footcare clinic with some of our medical and nursing students, I was reminded of the powerful role of libraries in the lives of people experiencing homelessness. Among the tables and tents offering warm winter coats, gloves, hats, behavioral health resources, pizza, bagels, coffee, haircuts, youth shelter and women’s day shelter services, and our footcare, the University Branch of the Seattl

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Josephine Ensign

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

I’m honored to be in such good company. I am taking my workshop, The Meaning of Home, on the road throughout Washington State in 2024-2025. If you/your library or other group wants to book me for this in-person or virtual workshop, contact Sarah Faulkner (see below for her e-mail address).

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Josephine Ensign

AUGUST 19, 2023

In winding down an academic career in anticipation of having more uninterrupted time for my writing and advocacy work on homelessness, I’m faced with what to do with the boxes and piles of research materials, field notes, correspondence, and my ‘digital assets,’ including this personal website and my digital storytelling videos. And then there are the hundreds of personal journals I have kept since I was eleven.

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Josephine Ensign

MAY 21, 2023

Encampment in U District Park, 2021, photo credit: Josephine Ensign The lived experience, the direct and unintentional (as in not stunt journalism) experience of homelessness, is increasingly used and prioritized in policy and program realms. While much of this is good, I think it needs to be examined more closely. As someone with the lived experience of homelessness when I was a young adult in my then hometown of Richmond, Virginia, it is a concept that I wrestle with.

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Josephine Ensign

FEBRUARY 24, 2023

Pioneer Square, Seattle. Photo credit: Josephine Ensign Although I love words and writing, there are many times when visual information is more effective at conveying complex ideas, facts, and emotions. That is why, for many years now, I have created digital storytelling videos about health and homelessness in Seattle. I use these videos in teaching and in my public scholarship.

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Josephine Ensign

JULY 3, 2021

Source: Seattle Municipal Archives, “Numbers and distribution of shacks by census tract, Seattle, WA” Here are my latest two brief (5-minute) educational videos that are part of my Skid Road project and linked with my forthcoming book, Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City. “Ark of Refuge” is about the Housing First model of care, how Seattle has been a leader in the implementation of this model, and about the historical (and colorful)

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Josephine Ensign

JULY 14, 2021

In the sea of bad journalism on homelessness, a few shiny good ones wash up on the shore. This (linked below) is one of the best, most thorough, and balanced articles on homelessness I have read. The inclusion of the history and place-based stories of Venice adds to its power. And the compassionate photographs by Glenna Gordon are stunning. Here in Seattle where we have one of our country’s highest rates of homelessness (along with NYC and San Fransisco), we have similar ongoing messy publ

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Josephine Ensign

AUGUST 11, 2021

Welcome to the strange new world! When I first conceived of and began research for what became my newest book, Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City , I knew I was in for a lot of hard work and more than a few surprises. What I didn’t know was that it would take over five years to complete the research and more than two years to write and see though to publication.

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Josephine Ensign

AUGUST 29, 2021

Everyone, it seems, is burned out these days. Frontline nurses, doctors, public health workers, and other healthcare providers who are weathering yet another vicious turn in the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontline service providers, short-staffed and short supplied. Parents struggling to parent well amidst the crazy-making politicized strife over a safe return of their children to in-person teaching at schools.

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Josephine Ensign

OCTOBER 28, 2021

Encampment below Harborview Medical Center, photo credit: Josephine Ensign, 2021 Amidst the raging debates about what to do about homelessness in Seattle and King County, the voices of people who work—and live—at the intersection of health and homelessness are drowned out. That needs to change if we hope to make any real progress towards solving homelessness and suffering in our city and neighborhood.

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Josephine Ensign

JANUARY 12, 2022

Sisters of Providence circa 1860 Long before Washington became a state, the first official caregivers of people with mental health problems were immigrant nurses from Montreal. Often overlooked and forgotten, the Catholic Sisters of Charity of Providence opened “St. John’s Lunatic Asylum” near Fort Vancouver in 1861. Caring for the mentally ill was part of their charitable and religious mission.

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Josephine Ensign

SEPTEMBER 24, 2022

Over dinner recently, my husband asked me if I was still writing blog posts. I replied, “No, not really.” When he asked me why not, I recounted how I had started writing this Medical Margins blog back in 2010 as I was processing my elderly father’s final illness and the insanity of the US healthcare system, especially related to end-of-life care.

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Josephine Ensign

OCTOBER 20, 2022

Tuna came one day, scratched at our door, begged for food, and never went away. The Meaning of Home Photo credit: Josephine Ensign/2016 Tuna came one day, scratched at our door, begged for food, and never went away. Home is where the cat is. –male resident of Tent City III Home is never permanent, but I know it is where I find safety. –female resident of Tent City III …home is a place one belongs to, a place of safety and a gathering point for reestablishing social connection. –

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Josephine Ensign

DECEMBER 30, 2022

My former late and great writing mentor, Waverly Fitzgerald, had those of us in her Shipping Group (a writing support and accountability group) do an end-of-year review of our writing. Being an accountability group focused on ‘shipping’ pieces of writing and writing-related grant applications, it ended up being more of a tally sheet: useful when starting out on my writing life.

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Josephine Ensign

JANUARY 16, 2023

Writing residencies and retreats are essential for maintaining and deepening my writing and creative life. If you have never taken one or you are planning to take time away to write, I’ll share my experience and advice for making the most of a residency or retreat. First, finding and applying for your first writing residency can be a daunting endeavor.

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