Bethany House Services

Gina Livecchi, Summer 2019

This past summer I worked at Bethany House Services, the largest family homeless shelter in Cincinnati. While at Bethany House, I split my time between working with the Child/Parent Coordinator and assisting the case managers. My typical roles and responsibilities when working with the case managers included observing intake procedures, attending case meetings, compiling and editing case notes, and following up with previous clients about aftercare services. I was able to work closely with all of the case managers at Bethany House and was able to see what a typical day is like for a social worker, which was a unique experience. When I was working for the Child/Parent Coordinator, I spent most of my time working directly with the kids who were staying at the shelter. I was able to do a variety of different things with the kids; some days I would provide childcare for families while the parents were at meetings while other days I worked at Kid's Zone and took the kids to the park or played with them inside. During my time at Kid's Zone, I taught two four-day nutrition courses at two different emergency shelter locations. Topics for my classes included the five food groups, serving sizes, and healthy versus unhealthy foods, and the final day of the course was dedicated to learning how to prepare healthy snacks. My project ended up being a pretty big hit—the kids really enjoyed the classes (especially making healthy snacks) and they learned a lot in the four days.

When I applied to Urban Health Project, I was primarily hoping to gain experience working with populations that I had never really come into contact with before. I was especially interested in working with a pediatric population, and was excited when I was assigned to Bethany House and was told that I would be able to work with the kids. Throughout the course of the summer, I was able to see firsthand what struggles the homeless population encounters on a daily basis. These people are often dealing with much more than just being without a home, and these issues affected the kids just as much as the adults. It was incredibly eye-opening to see what some of these kids have had to deal with in their lives thus far, and I think that this experience and the knowledge that I gained will be something that will stay with me as a future pediatrician.

Download Gina's poster (.pptx)