What the Clipboard Can’t Hold: Trauma-Informed Practice at the Intake Desk
Every day, I sit across from human crisis and translate it into eligibility categories. The clipboard demands clean data—verified income limits, confirmed household compositions, calculated benefit determinations—while a messy, bleeding narrative spills out just beyond its edges. I’ve written before about the woman who told me she was sleeping outside as an aside, mid-sentence, on her way back to asking about verification — there was no box on the form for the thing she was…
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