Street Spirit March 2006

Survival on the Streets

New Ways to Help Homeless People Survive

by Joseph McCord

Like most people who live in the Bay Area, I am appalled by the epidemic of homelessness, and want to do something about it. I buy Street Spirit and donate money from time to time, but I know that that only helps a little. I'd like to do more. It's hard for me to stop thinking about homeless people because I am only one step removed from their plight. If I weren't receiving disability checks, I would just about be homeless myself.

I've been wracking my brains to come up with some new ideas for homeless people. Here they are, free of charge!

1. Shake hands with the homeless

Homeless people face so many obstacles in overcoming their condition. Some are financial - getting enough money to eat and buy clothes -- and some are social. I think the thing that is most heartbreaking to me about walking down the street on an ordinary day is passing by people who seem forlorn, and knowing that I cannot, on the majority of occasions, do anything to help.

It seems like no matter what people feel about the homeless, how badly they want to help them or how guilty they feel, they avoid them like the plague, for the most part. I include myself in this, most of the time. Homeless people are perceived as being wretched and miserable, and as wanting money. They are perceived as interlopers, not as neighbors.

This creates a big, big problem -- bigger in some ways than the mere fact of not having a roof over one's head. It turns homeless people into a permanent underclass. It induces callousness in people who would otherwise be warmhearted: If I can't even help out the guy who's stranded on the street corner, what on earth can I do to alleviate misery in the world I live in?

Homeless people are treated as if they had bubbles or invisible barriers around them that keep most people away from them most of the time. Renaissance Faires and small-town organizations often have booths offering passers-by the opportunity to kiss someone or knock someone into a dunking pool for $5 or $10. Why not set up a "Shake Hands with the Homeless" booth, offering local residents the opportunity to contribute a small amount to a homeless person, and at the same cross those social boundaries by shaking their hand and having a short conversation?

2. Jobs for homeless people

In some cases, there are jobs that homeless people could do which would be profitable to them. Some people who happen to be on the street, far from being foolish or deranged, are full of wisdom and life experiences. Some of them would make excellent counselors, despite or even because of their lack of "formal" education.

If they were given a short education in peer counseling and a place to work from, they could offer counseling services to the public for a minimal fee or a small donation. People who could not otherwise afford professional counseling would benefit from this, and so would the homeless counselors. For some of them, it might even be an entree into a permanent profession!

3. Donate time and energy

Lots of people would be willing to donate some time and energy to helping homeless people; they just don't want their lives to be consumed by it, and they're unsure as to where to draw the line. If 30 people in the same area each volunteered to house one homeless person one day per month, that would provide complete temporary shelter for one person.

A few hundred once-a-month volunteers in the Berkeley area could reasonably house a sizeable portion of the homeless people here. This sort of ongoing contact with average citizens would help homeless people to develop a greater sense of belonging in their own community, and more confidence in their ability to find a more permanent place for themselves in society. A program like this, if it were well administered, would have the added benefit of allowing the tiny minority of homeless people who are genuinely difficult to get along with to be weeded out of the program.

There are tons of people who would gladly contribute their time and resources in this way -- they just don't want to be stuck housing a homeless person permanently! At a time when so many homeless people can't even find a place in a shelter, this would make a huge difference in many people's lives.

It's something that ordinary people could do that would have far greater immediate impact than volunteer work building houses. It would help homeless people to feel more human and more included, and help a lot of the rest of us to actually live our own ethics in the community! All it needs is somebody who is better at this sort of thing than I am to organize it!

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