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Dear Doreen (hopefully you spot this), thank you for an amazing article -- and also congrats on your recent first pull request, no small feat! :) I have a ques

Dear Doreen (hopefully you spot this), thank you for an amazing article -- and also congrats on your recent first pull request, no small feat! :) I have a question for you; I've been hoping for an opportunity to ask a person who could answer this genuinely (something that I could not guarantee by asking just anyone off the street). What is the best way for someone like me (a non-homeless person who wants to help), to actually help either a particular homeless person or the homeless community in general, in a way that makes an actual positive difference in their lives? I am completely disenfranchised with the various charities out there purporting to help homeless people; I think most are shameless money-grabbing schemes. E.g., one of the most popular charities in the UK rakes in a boatload of money due to their catchy name, but once you get to the gist of what they actually do, it's basically "advice over the phone", which could have been done much more effectively as a free subreddit frequented by actual homeless users. My suspicions that they are largely worthless were confirmed by my wife, who said she once called them (before we met) at a time of need, and they were full of generalities and not of much practical use with regard to the actual problem she was facing. I have now spotted a charity that sounds legit (shelterfromthestorm) and now happily donate to that ... but even then I'm not sure, and it feels odd to be helping out a London-specific charity when I'm not a Londoner and there's homeless people right outside my doorstep. On the other hand, while I generally try to help out people in the street, that too typically doesn't feel like the best thing I could be doing. I know that at a certain level it's none of my business what people do with the money I give them, and that everyone's got their own demons to fight, but realistically I'd like to have some control in knowing my money was put to good use and actually made a positive difference to someone, rather than what I fear is more likely to happen many times, which is reinforcing negative behaviours/circumstances, and learned helplessness in people who could be helped in more substantial ways. It also doesn't help that (understandably) there are a lot of scammers embedded in this community -- I've lost count of the number of times someone attempted to shake my hand first, and while still shaking would say they missed their London-Glasgow bus, and could I give them money for another ticket, or some equally frustrating story like that. The most disillusioned I've seen my wife was when she fell for a similar story and gave money for a very expensive ticket to a person -- I made her wait outside the train station for the next five minutes to prove this person would intentionally miss their train, and come out asking for ticket money again (I was right). I find myself that I volunteer to buy food for people a lot - especially when they're stationed next to supermarkets. Which is nice in terms of ensuring some of the above "guarantees", and the people who want food are generally very grateful for it ... but I have a feeling that food is probably not necessarily the most pressing problem for most homeless people. And now with this pandemic, I haven't been out of my house for a while, so this face-to-face interaction has also gone. Once in a while one entertains the romanticised thought of befriending a particular local homeless person they see often, or even offering a room, or a place to shower or shave, etc, but realistically this is feel-good fantasy land; as soon as you get even within an inch of a person, both their survival instincts and yours start ringing loud alarm bells, and you realise very quickly that it's not a good idea. So, (and sorry for the long rant), as someone who's lived all this from the other side, and knows what kind of help they could have used most at the time, and realistically what form this could take in order to work at a practical level ... what would you advise?

DoreenMichele 6y ago
Thank you. The pull request was a big moment for me. When I was homeless, random acts of kindness were a godsend and I generally preferred cash, but sometimes a jacket or blanket in cold weather was hugely helpful and even better than cash at that moment. Occasionally, someone gifted me a hotel stay and it made a big difference. I wrote some about those ideas here: http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2015/01/random-acts-of-kindness.html http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2015/01/random-acts... http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2017/02/cash-and-gift-cards.html http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2017/02/cash-and-gi... http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2016/12/hotel-stays-especially-in-inclement.html http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2016/12/hotel-stays... http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2016/11/free-clean-dry-used-clothes.html http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2016/11/free-clean-... To be clear, I never begged or made up stories about having lost my but ticket or whatever. People just sometimes identified me as homeless and did things like offered to pay my grocery tab as I was checking out or handed me a gift card or handed me a blanket. I think you would maybe need to think a bit about how to spot homeless people in situations where it would make sense to do that sort of thing to feel confident this isn't some con game. One of the problems with "trying to help the homeless" is the Shirky Principle: "Organizations will tend to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." If you really want to see fewer homeless people on the street, it's best to work to find ways to prevent homelessness and reduce the incidence of it as opposed to focusing solely on helping those already out in the street. Yes, people who are currently out in the street desperately need some help. But the one thing I most wanted help with while homeless was help trying to establish an earned income so I could get my life back and almost no one took me seriously on that point. I was viewed as a "charity case" and no one anyone would want to pay for services. Someone on Metafilter once characterized my efforts to monetize my websites as me "panhandling the internet." Meanwhile, Metafilter brags about providing well-paid cushy work for it's paid moderating staff and takes donations for their site since their ad money was infamously cut by some change in the Adsense algorithm. But me taking donations for my writing was somehow "different" from what they were doing and "bad." I've run into similar issues since getting off the street. For a time, I did volunteer work for local charities that nominally do economic development. I quit all my volunteer work back in May of this year. They wouldn't help me establish a better income and didn't really want to pay me (even when there was a payment agreement, they made me feel like I was misbehaving to expect my check in a timely fashion), while eager to give me more unpaid volunteer work because I was getting things done. It's an insidious form of classism that says "We like what you do, but we don't think you deserve to be paid because you are too poor to dress right" or something. It's a trap that's shockingly hard to escape: I'm too poor for anyone to think I deserve a middle class wage for my work, even if I am doing good quality work, so I can't get rich enough to dress well enough to signal socially that I deserve a middle class wage for my work. People want more of that work from me but they want it for free on the justification that I don't dress right or some nonsense. In the US, I would like to see universal health care coverage and I would like to see changes to our housing policies. There is a shocking shortage of "affordable housing" -- unfortunately, that's a really loaded term. It means a particular thing to most people. I mean it as literally as possible, but it is perhaps best to describe what I mean and that is smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods available at a modest price even though it is market rate housing and not some kind of homeless program. A lot of people on the street have some income, just not enough to support a middle class lifestyle. Cost of housing and inability to find inexpensive housing that supports a car-free lifestyle are two big challenges in the US for the sorts of people who end up on the street. I would be all for someone starting a business that builds Missing Middle housing as a for profit endeavor or that builds SROs as a for profit endeavor. In many places in the US, we have thrown up zoning barriers to building Missing Middle housing and we have torn down a million SROs in the US in recent decades. SROs used to be normal market-rate housing for ordinary people with ordinary jobs who just wanted to rent a room. Now, we think of them solely as part of some homeless program to help people get off the street, and that means that ordinary people with not much money get forced into being "charity cases" instead of having humble but independent lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy I think if you want to be helpful in this space, it's useful to keep two things in mind: 1. On an individual basis: The sorts of problems that lead to homelessness can be hard to remedy, so even if they are making a sincere effort, it can take a long time to see results. (So don't expect a one-time gift of cash or something to magically remedy their situation.) 2. On a societal level: In a perfect world, we would do a better job of caring for "the people" such that having some kind of personal issue would be less likely to cause your life to come unraveled and land you on the street. That means doing a better job addressing basic needs like health care, housing, transportation even if someone can't drive for some reason and so forth and doing so simply because people exist and not based on them finally being desperate enough to qualify for some needs-based program or other.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

Thank you. The pull request was a big moment for me. When I was homeless, random acts of kindness were a godsend and I generally preferred cash, but sometimes a jacket or blanket in cold weather was hugely helpful and even better than cash at that moment. Occasionally, someone gifted me a hotel stay and it made a big difference. I wrote some about those ideas here: http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2015/01/random-acts-of-kindness.html http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2015/01/random-acts... http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2017/02/cash-and-gift-cards.html http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2017/02/cash-and-gi... http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2016/12/hotel-stays-especially-in-inclement.html http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2016/12/hotel-stays... http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2016/11/free-clean-dry-used-clothes.html http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2016/11/free-clean-... To be clear, I never begged or made up stories about having lost my but ticket or whatever. People just sometimes identified me as homeless and did things like offered to pay my grocery tab as I was checking out or handed me a gift card or handed me a blanket. I think you would maybe need to think a bit about how to spot homeless people in situations where it would make sense to do that sort of thing to feel confident this isn't some con game. One of the problems with "trying to help the homeless" is the Shirky Principle: "Organizations will tend to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." If you really want to see fewer homeless people on the street, it's best to work to find ways to prevent homelessness and reduce the incidence of it as opposed to focusing solely on helping those already out in the street. Yes, people who are currently out in the street desperately need some help. But the one thing I most wanted help with while homeless was help trying to establish an earned income so I could get my life back and almost no one took me seriously on that point. I was viewed as a "charity case" and no one anyone would want to pay for services. Someone on Metafilter once characterized my efforts to monetize my websites as me "panhandling the internet." Meanwhile, Metafilter brags about providing well-paid cushy work for it's paid moderating staff and takes donations for their site since their ad money was infamously cut by some change in the Adsense algorithm. But me taking donations for my writing was somehow "different" from what they were doing and "bad." I've run into similar issues since getting off the street. For a time, I did volunteer work for local charities that nominally do economic development. I quit all my volunteer work back in May of this year. They wouldn't help me establish a better income and didn't really want to pay me (even when there was a payment agreement, they made me feel like I was misbehaving to expect my check in a timely fashion), while eager to give me more unpaid volunteer work because I was getting things done. It's an insidious form of classism that says "We like what you do, but we don't think you deserve to be paid because you are too poor to dress right" or something. It's a trap that's shockingly hard to escape: I'm too poor for anyone to think I deserve a middle class wage for my work, even if I am doing good quality work, so I can't get rich enough to dress well enough to signal socially that I deserve a middle class wage for my work. People want more of that work from me but they want it for free on the justification that I don't dress right or some nonsense. In the US, I would like to see universal health care coverage and I would like to see changes to our housing policies. There is a shocking shortage of "affordable housing" -- unfortunately, that's a really loaded term. It means a particular thing to most people. I mean it as literally as possible, but it is perhaps best to describe what I mean and that is smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods available at a modest price even though it is market rate housing and not some kind of homeless program. A lot of people on the street have some income, just not enough to support a middle class lifestyle. Cost of housing and inability to find inexpensive housing that supports a car-free lifestyle are two big challenges in the US for the sorts of people who end up on the street. I would be all for someone starting a business that builds Missing Middle housing as a for profit endeavor or that builds SROs as a for profit endeavor. In many places in the US, we have thrown up zoning barriers to building Missing Middle housing and we have torn down a million SROs in the US in recent decades. SROs used to be normal market-rate housing for ordinary people with ordinary jobs who just wanted to rent a room. Now, we think of them solely as part of some homeless program to help people get off the street, and that means that ordinary people with not much money get forced into being "charity cases" instead of having humble but independent lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy I think if you want to be helpful in this space, it's useful to keep two things in mind: 1. On an individual basis: The sorts of problems that lead to homelessness can be hard to remedy, so even if they are making a sincere effort, it can take a long time to see results. (So don't expect a one-time gift of cash or something to magically remedy their situation.) 2. On a societal level: In a perfect world, we would do a better job of caring for "the people" such that having some kind of personal issue would be less likely to cause your life to come unraveled and land you on the street. That means doing a better job addressing basic needs like health care, housing, transportation even if someone can't drive for some reason and so forth and doing so simply because people exist and not based on them finally being desperate enough to qualify for some needs-based program or other.