By Madeline Gauthier, University of Nevada-Reno

I believe that access to good, reliable, and affordable healthcare is a right that all people should have regardless of housing or insurance status. Even under the best of circumstances, though, it can be extremely difficult to receive this care, especially in a city like Reno where the cost of living is so high. I started thinking about this topic after Chair Alexis Hill, who represents Washoe County Commission District 1, spoke to our class, saying that the Cares Campus in Reno partners with a hospital to provide healthcare services to unhoused individuals. I think this partnership is a step in the right direction, but it left me with many unanswered questions. Are these medical services paid for, or are unhoused individuals expected to pay for them? Do these services require insurance? Are homeless shelters set up with resources that help unhoused individuals gain access to insurance? And furthermore, are these services exclusively for people who have secured a bed for the night at a shelter? If this is the case, what are the healthcare options for people who are living on the street? I was motivated to undertake this project because I wanted to better understand the current healthcare landscape for the unhoused community in Reno so that I could identify potential gaps to be filled.

Healthcare is a very broad topic, and there is no “right” way to serve the unhoused demographic. I didn’t want to produce a traditional research paper that would suggest a solution based on impersonal research and guided by my own internal biases; instead, I wanted to engage directly with the community members at the center of my research. My guiding principle for this project was to understand healthcare for unhoused individuals by writing with community members instead of about or for them. I wanted the interviewees to be able to tell their own stories, which is why I decided to record them speaking in a podcast as opposed to paraphrasing or quoting them in a paper. The podcast medium was also important for me to use because its information is conversational in nature and much more accessible to a wider audience than an academic paper. I wanted this project to be engaging for all members of the Reno community with the aim of educating them on the realities of healthcare accessibility for the unhoused population.

My goal for this project was to contextualize the conversation around healthcare for the unhoused and come up with solutions for a path forward through my conversations with three interviewees. I strategically chose my guests to try to represent key perspectives that were varied in nature. Speaking with Cameron, my classmate who was formerly unhoused, provided an overview of the current healthcare landscape and the needs of the unhoused community based on his own lived experiences. It was important to me to include his perspective because his words helped to combat the bias and assumptions that many listeners unintentionally bring to this topic. Interviewing Julia from the Hope Spring program helped to shed some light on the current resources and actions being taken by those running services for the unhoused here in Reno, and putting her words into conversation with Cameron’s was meant to identify gaps in our current healthcare services. Because healthcare is a broad topic, I wanted to contextualize Cameron’s and Julia’s conversations with the concrete example of vaccinations. Jenna, a community health worker with Immunize Nevada, provided insights about the specific struggles faced by the unhoused community when trying to get vaccinated, which served as the concrete case study. Together, these three guests provided a better picture of the state of healthcare for the unhoused in Reno than I would have with traditional academic research alone.

Through this project, I learned a lot about the internal assumptions and biases that I and other writers can bring to the topics we write about. I wrote questions for each guest based on research I had done about them and their programs, but I often had to adjust my questions mid-interview because the guests would say something I hadn’t planned for. Ultimately, these new perspectives led to a more interesting, accurate conversation, but they also forced me to reckon with the internal assumptions that I brought to the project. Since this project, I have tried to keep implementing this “writing with” method in my other work to ensure that I am approaching nonfiction with empathy while still empowering the communities I write about.