The Mobile Thriving Respite With and for the Street Community

Abstract

We report on our work with the street community of Pittsburgh, specifically, a community-based action initiative we call the Mobile Thriving Respite (Institutional Review Board approval was obtained from our university). For 5 years, student advocate ethnographers from Point Park University have gathered data (e.g., long- and short-term interviews, participant-observations generating fieldnotes). The data revealed and supported the need for thriving beyond surviving homelessness. The data endorsed the creation of the mobile thriving respite. In the first part of this work, we will discuss some critical concepts regarding homelessness as a phenomenon and then argue that while surviving as enduring is necessary, there are some for whom survival is a perpetual, lethal state of being. We will discuss the theoretical foundations to the respite and offer researchers’ ethnographic accounts of the respite’s process and progress (We had to temporarily end the respite during the Covid-19 pandemic. To date, the respite has returned with “pop up” events outside at various locations). We will outline how the mobile thriving respite is a praxis as site of resistance as well as an emergent strategy, and an instantiation of communitas. We will then revisit surviving as collectively bearing witness and testifying to the lived experiences of those living outside.