Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net

At the beginning of the homelessness epidemic in the 1980s, Josephine Ensign was a young, white, Southern, Christian wife, mother, and nurse running a new medical clinic for the homeless in the heart of the South. Through her work and intense relationships with patients and co-workers, her worldview was shattered, and after losing her job, family, and house, she became homeless herself. She reconstructed her life with altered views on homelessness-and on the health care system. In Catching Homelessness, Ensign reflects on how this work has changed her and how her work has changed through the experience of being homeless-providing a piercing look at the homelessness industry, nursing, and our country’s health care safety net.