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giving

Holiday Canned Goods

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | 2 Comments

I started at my job this summer, so I’m excited for the holiday season in a new place . Some of my more festive coworkers have already organized both Secret Santa and a holiday potluck. I was a big believer in workplace holiday spirit, until I heard about the tradition of an Ohio WalMart. The Cleveland store asks staff to donate not to a potluck or a dinner — but canned foods to other employees in need this season. To many people, a practice like this one might seem shocking, but let’s not pretend we haven’t all heard the horror stories about the working conditions of the country’s largest retailer.  Working a minimum wage job hardly leaves an employee enough money for a lavish holiday celebration, especially if they are supporting a family.

One study reports that more than twenty-eight percent of individuals experiencing homelessness do work — but a paycheck isn’t always a ticket out of the shelter. This number might seem small, until we consider that many factors that lead to homelessness also prevent an individual from working —  disabilities, mental illness, domestic violence. Many who can work, do work, but as WalMart demonstrates, the income doesn’t always cover every expense, especially around the holiday season.

While every WalMart employee has their own budget and their own expenses, it is worth noting that the donation boxes are placed in staff locker rooms, not the corporate lounge. The company is asking its employees who are slightly more financially stable to steady their coworkers. This is heartwarming in a community-building, lean-on-me kind of way, but it is far from a sustainable way to put food on the table.

Except that maybe it is.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that the middle class give and donate more frequently and more generously as related to their income than more wealthy individuals. States with lower household incomes — Utah and Mississippi — gave more than twice as much of their annual income away than more wealthy northern states. This might not make much financial sense, but — as WalMart and many other groups that target lower income individuals realize — those who understand poverty are the most likely to offer help to get through it.

If only that generosity and knowledge could trickle up. Maybe the best way to make this a happy holiday is for the canned goods — or even fresh food — to come from those with the means to provide lasting, sustainable services to hardworking individuals experiencing poverty and homelessness.

 

 

Outlawing Spare Change

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | One Comment

Some people are surprised to learn that I don’t usually give money to panhandlers. It isn’t because I don’t care about those experiencing homelessness. It is because 1. Working in homeless services (shockingly) doesn’t pay me enough to pull out my wallet every day, 2. I don’t carry cash nearly as often as I should, and 3. I can’t give away money to the clients at my job, even if I could afford to.

So today, when I gave a dollar bill to a guy with a sign and a battered Red Sox cap, it wasn’t because I thought it would end homelessness. It was because I am so disturbed by the legislation before Baltimore City Council this month that attempts to make panhandling illegal that I wanted to give a dollar away before it becomes too late. Also, I am really rooting for the Red Sox.

Several Baltimore laws already prohibit aggressive panhandling, but a new proposal would encourage police to put increased pressure on individuals asking for money. The bill would outlaw panhandling within ten feet of any restaurant or storefront. Anyone who has spent time in Baltimore will realize that this essentially outlaws asking for money in all of downtown. Councilwoman Rochelle “Rikki” Spector, who supports the bill, thinks these rules will put an end to what she deems the “atrocious behavior” of asking people on the street for spare change.

You’ve likely seen the cardboard signs, “Looking for Work,” or “Homeless, Anything Helps.” To me, these signs are people silently screaming for help, people who have run out of options. Asking for help is what we teach children to do at a young age, and yet Baltimore is considering taking away that right. If visitors to the downtown area don’t want to give money, they can — and should — calmly say no. Panhandling will not put an end to homelessness. It has no place in the The Journey Home, nor is it anyone’s ideal source of income. But on a day when someone is hungry, or needs bus fare, or shampoo, is it wrong to ask your neighbors for some help?

I often hear that people are afraid the person they donate to will use the money for drugs or alcohol. More than once I have accompanied an individual into a sandwich shop or a grocery store and picked up the tab (as has Change-Engine contributor Robyn Stegman), but when I give cash, I don’t ask questions about where it is going. Giving money away is my choice, but how someone spends it is not.

If “atrocious behavior” means buying something to eat, talking to strangers, or asking for help, then I’d suggest that we are all guilty — and I’d hope for more, not less, of this behavior in Baltimore.

Let Them Eat Subway

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 2 Comments

I was walking down the street this weekend when two homeless men stopped me to ask for a couple of dollars to buy a sandwich. I told them I didn’t have cash on me but one of the men suggested that I could just go to Subway and buy them the sandwich on my credit card. I agreed and while we were waiting for the sub, he says to me “It’s a shame you didn’t have cash, we would have been able to get cheaper food.” Now my first thought was something akin to “You ungrateful SOB,” but then I realized he was right and in fact being a good steward of my charity. If I had given him the seven dollars I spent at Subway he might have been able to go to the corner store where he could have gotten a decent meal for $4 and still had $3 to put toward his next meal. If I wanted more bang for my buck in terms of impact on his empty stomach I should have just given him cash.

This is a problem with our welfare system as well. There are programs to pay for heating, food, medical expenses, etc. but they are all in separate pots and restricted for a limited purpose. Not only does that mean people are forced to go to dozens of different places with different application processes to meet their needs, they are also not able to budget in a way that works for them. This has led to a black market where people sell or trade their food stamps  to pay for rent, shoes, heat, diapers and other necessities. While some people are appalled by the business of buying and selling welfare benefits, the practice allows people to make ends meet.

So why don’t we just give out money? One argument you hear frequently is that by giving a sandwich I at least know my money is spent on food. If I just gave the man $7 he could have used it to fuel the addiction which caused him to be on streets in the first place or for some other nefarious action which would have left him off worse than before and still hungry. The giving of sandwiches is intended to ensure that the money doesn’t go toward actions that would hurt the recipient but it also prevents them from doing anything with the money that might help them, so that, possibly, they would not need me to give them a sandwich. You can’t build financial stability by saving food stamps in a bank account and then using them to pay your heating bill in the winter. In that way it undermines the financial health of the recipient. The system of earmarking donations assumes that the recipient has become poor because they don’t know how to manage their money. So we take control of their financial future.

Malcolm Gladwell points out that any cost that helps a person out of homelessness is far more cost-effective then just meeting their presumed needs in this fascinating piece. He gives the example of a program in Denver that gives chronic homeless people free apartments because the cost of providing an apartment and a case worker is far cheaper than the housing, medical, and other expenses that come as a result of having them out on the streets. Fellow ChangeEngine author Jasmine Arnold offers another example in her blog about asking versus assuming the needs of homeless people. She cites an article from The Economist profiling a charity called Broadway, which moved 84 percent of their clients off the streets simply by asking individuals what they needed to improve their lives. To quote The Economist piece: “The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.”

I’d like to challenge the assumption that the way the givers of welfare earmark funds does a better job in lifting people out of poverty than the way the recipients would spend it. As economist  Uwe E. Reinhardt argues, it is in ineffective. If we are looking to maximize the impact on the recipient per dollar we give then we should give money not benefits. Why? We aren’t experts in other people’s needs. What we think people need might be different than their reality but the walls we’ve built around their benefits prevents them from accessing those funds for anything beyond our understanding of what should lift them up from poverty.

Let’s stop defining people’s needs for them. If we’re going to maximize our impact on someone per dollar spent, we’ve got to stop assuming we have the answer and start asking some questions. Let’s stop giving sandwiches and start helping people get the reigns back on their financial futures.

 

IMAGE CREDIT. Courtesy of cobalt