It’s safe to say Benjamin Henwood is having a good year.

The assistant professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work recently secured several large federal grants to explore issues among homeless youth and older adults, is helping oversee the annual homelessness count in Los Angeles and is emerging as a leading expert as the social work profession takes on the grand challenge of homelessness on a national level.

That wasn’t exactly the plan when he left the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee with a master’s degree in philosophy, nor 15 years ago when he decided to leave the bustle and stress of a stock-trading job in New York in pursuit of a career in social work.

But now Henwood finds himself at the epicenter of a broad movement to reconceive how society should address one of its greatest ills.

“Never before has the public and political interest been as focused on this topic, so it all seems to be coming together,” he said. “We are at a tipping point, especially in Los Angeles but also throughout the country, that something has to be done. We need change.”

Tracing his unusual path to becoming a leading researcher on homelessness and health services, Henwood described his first day as a philosophy master’s student, when his instructor told him and his classmates that if they had ever thought of doing anything else, they should pursue that path instead. Philosophy is a difficult profession with very few jobs, she told them.

To Henwood, it was a rude awakening. He could imagine himself doing plenty of other things. He continued with the program, but remained disquieted by the advice.

Feeling somewhat unmoored after graduating, he decided to take some time off before deciding whether to jump into a PhD program. Through connections in New York, he landed a job as a stock trader, a move he now acknowledges as linked to his position of privilege as a young white man.

“It was literally rows and rows of desks with computers and other guys who looked a lot like me just banging on keyboards and trading stocks all day,” Henwood said. “It was probably 95 percent men.”

All that glitters

He came onto the financial scene in the late 90s, before the tech bubble, and initially reveled in the excitement and easy money. But the shine quickly wore off.

“I realized I was pretty miserable,” he said. “You evaluated your success based on money. On any given day, if I made money all I could think of was how I could have made more money. If I lost money, well, obviously that never felt good.”

As he plotted his next move, Henwood began seeing a therapist and became intrigued with the process. Therapy was helping him, so why couldn’t he use it to help other people?

New York University had a rolling admission schedule for its social work program, so he signed up before even telling his girlfriend, now his wife. He would spend his mornings trading stocks after the opening bell, then head to class in the afternoon after the market calmed down.

Seeking balance

“After my first semester, after I took all these cool classes on psychodynamic therapy, institutional racism and other topics, I started to think, how am I doing this and trading stocks at the same time?” he said. “There was some cognitive dissonance going on.”

He decided he wanted to volunteer but wasn’t sure how best to give back to the community. During a research class taught by Deborah Padgett, now a close colleague and collaborator, Henwood learned about Housing First, a revolutionary new model of addressing homelessness by giving people a place to live before anything else, rather than requiring sobriety or employment before providing housing.

Intrigued by the concept, he met with the program’s founder, Sam Tsemberis, to ask about volunteer opportunities. He was promptly tasked with leading a vocational program that connected Housing First clients with jobs.

However, Henwood had little experience working with people with serious mental illness, so he approached the program’s clinical director and asked how he should interact with clients who had schizophrenia or other mental health issues.

“He said just treat everyone like a person,” Henwood said. “And he said it in a way that totally freed me up. I just stopped worrying about what I was supposed to do. I just felt comfortable in my own skin.”

His wife confirmed that sense of ease when she came to a picnic he helped organize with a group of clients in Harlem.

“She said I just looked totally comfortable,” he said. “She could see it.”

He completed his MSW in 2004 and earned a PhD in social work, also at New York University, in 2011. Along the way, he racked up valuable experience as clinical director and then director of research at a Housing First program in Philadelphia. In 2012, he joined USC and focused his research agenda on homelessness, health services, substance use and serious mental illness.

Parallel paths

In hindsight, Henwood said his unconventional route to social work actually isn’t too surprising, given his family background. His father, a Christian Brother, had taken a vow of poverty and essentially served as a social worker for much of his early adulthood before he began questioning inconsistencies in church policies.

In his early 40s, he left the movement with little more than $100 and a basket of strawberries from a garden on the church grounds. He remained civically engaged, began teaching and met Henwood’s mother, also an educator, a year later.

“He was always trying to find a way to sort of catch up and provide for us, so he got into real estate in Philadelphia,” Henwood said. “At one point, he had 21 properties he would rent out. It was this weird mix of helping the world and at the same time this economic and business side that existed throughout my life.”

In a way, Henwood is grateful for the bumpy road that brought him to social work. He linked his growing sense of unease and anxiety as a master’s student to a feeling that he would have spent his life spinning his wheels as a philosopher.

“All that energy wasn’t tied into anything in the real world. I probably would have been brooding my whole life,” he said. “Social work allows me to indulge as much as I want in the intellectual side, and that’s really stimulating and interesting, but it’s also tied into the real world.”

Setting the agenda

Some of those real-world issues he is currently tackling include the relatively unstudied interactions between age and homelessness. Henwood is in the midst of recruiting participants for a study on geriatric conditions such as dementia, hearing loss and frailty among older adults living in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles.

He is also considering the opposite end of the age spectrum in a $1.6 million research project examining how supportive housing influences HIV risk behaviors among teenagers and young adults experiencing homelessness.

At the same time, he is looking to broader problems. Although he is still somewhat surprised by his blossoming identity as an expert in homelessness, Henwood said he is starting to ponder how best to use his powerful new platform to advocate for societal change.

“Solving homelessness feels like such a low bar. I know it’s going to be a lot of work, but it almost feels like that should be the least of our problems,” he said. “Even if we get there, there are a million questions about health disparities and people’s health and well-being and connectedness to the world. Intellectually, it’s very exciting and I don’t know where it’s going to lead me.”