Iowa Ideas: Working together to address overlapping human needs

Needing help can look like a lot of things: Not being able to afford food, not having somewhere to live, not knowing why you feel depressed and anxious. It can be obvious, or it can be hard to see.

Social service professionals across Iowa work to address human needs in various ways, and the intersection between their sectors is significant. Food insecurity can be related to transportation, which can be related to work — and so on.

“How can we lift someone up and help them out of poverty?” asked Linda Gorkow, the executive director of the Iowa Food Bank Association. “We have to look at the whole person and everything that is going on in their life. If they don’t have transportation, they can’t get a job. Then they can’t get money and then they can’t pay for their housing, then they get kicked out of their housing.”

Gorkow is one of the panelists as part of the Human and Social Services track of the Oct. 12 and 13 Iowa Ideas virtual conference.

Although Gorkow primarily works to lower food insecurity in Iowa — and will be talking about that work in a session focused on creative solutions to food insecurity — she said that work is incomplete unless work is also being done in other sectors.

“When we look at an Iowan, those that we serve, it’s what affects their life in a comprehensive way. It’s not that they just have food insecurity and that everything else is fine,” Gorkow said. “The situations all layer themselves on top of each other. Food is sometimes the thing that is a flag for something more going on, and homelessness, of course, is a huge flag, too.”

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Two Iowa Ideas sessions will discuss housing, and one will focus on making resources available for people at various stages of risk for homelessness. Another session will focus on responses to homelessness. Other session topics include political barriers for those who need help, life after incarceration, social needs and partnerships between schools and nonprofits, and teens in mental health crisis.

Dr. Richard Whitaker, the chief executive officer of Vera French Community Mental Health Center in Davenport and a commissioner for the Iowa Mental Health and Disability Services Commission, is set to be a panelist the Oct. 12 session on teen mental health.

In an interview, he said mental health struggles often are worsened by other difficulties in life, and the mental health of teenagers can easily be tied to the well-being of the adults in their lives.

“Poverty has a huge impact on teens, not just because of obvious things like food insecurity, or housing instability, but it also impacts their ability to form strong relationships with positive peers. It also impacts their ability to get good health care,” Whitaker said.

Whitaker said Vera French has been looking at ways to include teenagers in supporting other teens, and pointed out that including young people in other social service discussions could be a way to find new perspectives and possible solutions.

“I think it’ll be teenagers and young adults who ultimately solve some of these problems for the rest of us. I just think that there are more ideas and more solutions coming from the younger folks … than there are coming from folks my age and older,” Whitaker said.

Solutions, regardless of where they come from, have to involve action, according to Joshua Barr, founder and president of Raising the Barr LLC. Raising the Barr is a Des Moines company that consults with private organizations on things like diversity, equity and inclusion, fair housing compliance, workplace discrimination and harassment and other civil rights issues that can affect a company or community culture.

Barr was a member of the Iowa Ideas Human and Social Services Advisory Council in 2023, which helped to shape the session topics for the track for this year, conference. He said that while having discussions at Iowa Ideas is important, what matters more is what participants do with the information they learn.

“It’s important to have a discussion, because nobody has all the ideas … we need to talk about where do we want to go as a community. How do we get there and what talents, passions, ideas do you bring to the table to in addressing it?” Barr said. “But it’s one thing to have a discussion and it’s another thing to take action. A lot of times we can get so stuck in having conversations that we never take action.”

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