How To Help the Homeless

Here is a writing I gleaned from a website many moons ago on November 30, 2011 

•  Volunteer at a shelter or a soup kitchen. If you don’t know where to find one, ask and I will find one for you. If the times don’t work for you, make some sandwiches, put them in a back pack and go downtown and hand them out. It will feel awkward at first, you will get over it quickly.

•  Give money to these organizations. Do some research, find out how they are helping to get people OUT of homelessness—they are the best in my mind.

• Hand out bottled water in the summer. Again, go downtown, you will know who is homeless. More of the homeless die in the heat of the summer than do on the streets in the winter.

• Hire someone homeless or help them find a job. Having proper identification and transportation, etc… make it hard enough. Give someone a chance, gaps in employment is to be expected.

•  Become an advocate for a homeless person. There are places that you can become part of a group that works as an advocate and serve as a network for a specific homeless family.

• Donate your clothes, shoes and blankets to the shelters, or again go down and hand the blankets out when it’s cold.

•   Donate Tupperware. Many of the soup kitchens will make meals “to go” for those who are working so that at lunch time they will have something to eat. They can use your Tupperware.

•  Collect the soap and shampoos from hotels. If you are a frequent traveler take these home and give them to the shelters and soup kitchens around you.

•  Give out backpacks and duffel bags. You can put a few things in the backpacks and duffel bags that are sitting in the back of your closet and hand them out.

•  Umbrellas in the rain, flip flops in the summer, etc… You get the idea. All of these are available at dollar stores. Keep them in your car for the right time.

•  Engage them in conversation. Most homeless are treated like they are invisible. In one of the interviews we did this summer a man said he went several months without ever hearing his name.

•  THIS DOES NOT LET YOU OFF THE HOOK FROM DOING ANYTHING ELSE.