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Paper short abstract

On outreach nights, policy goals like ending extreme poverty by 2030 feel unreal. Moving through a world of scarce beds and untreated illness, volunteers working in Spain with the homeless patch unmet needs with improvisation. But they complain: “no one cares”, as care inequalities become visible.

Paper long abstract

Policy documents often speak of a more efficient use of resources and even promise the eradication of extreme poverty (2020, 2030…), but it never happens. For the homeless, those deadlines dissolve into lack of resources and care. They lack medical attention, mental health support, safe shelter, and care. The most troublesome need is scarcity of accommodation. Drawing on participant observation as a volunteer with the Spanish Red Cross, I approach care poverty and care inequalities at the margins of homelessness outreach work.

Though the elder, the hospitalised, or the children are the usual subjects of the ethnographies of care, the homeless, stuck in “zones of abandonment”, with unmet need, and wounds inflicted by “structural violence”, end up meeting early death.

Outreach encounters involve people with untreated conditions like cancers, cirrhosis, tuberculosis, infected wounds at risk of gangrene, mental illnesses, addictions, loneliness. Volunteers record needs and refer the homeless to support services that do not materialise.

Volunteers struggle with unmet need and frequently initiate care without request, improvising support with personal resources when formal routes fail. These practices generate friction with professional social workers, whose institutional priorities and eligibility rules require rationing and the reordering of needs. Volunteers often complain of abandonment, lack of resources, and lack of interest on the part of institutions and their social workers.

“No one cares”, they say. These encounters at the margins of homelessness outreach, as a site of care, make care poverty visible.