Homelessness 1 | Page 4

Helping The Homeless

By: Charlie Brandt

“Do What You Can With All You Have, Wherever You Are.”

– Theodore Roosevelt

Figuring Out my STF

Throughout my life, my family and I have always done our best to help out others in need. My family was a military family and I am even named after my uncle chuck, a war veteran. When we first started this project all the people I talked too told me to do something broad but localized; I knew if it wasn't somehow connected to me i wouldn't try to put work into it so i had to decide on something fun that i could reach. My grandpa Jeff had just visited and he is also a veteran. At the same time my mother was working at a place called the refuge cafe. The refuge cafe is a place that educates homeless veterans to roast coffee beans. There were already good resources for learning about how to help better so I chose to help homeless Veterans, which later turned into all homeless.

The Problem

“HUD painted its report, the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, as a minor victory. A press release declared, “Homelessness in the U.S. remained largely unchanged in 2018.” The report found the nationwide count of people experiencing homelessness rose by 0.3 percent, to 552,830.”(woods, 2018, Federal report: Homelessness spikes in Arizona, rising 10 percent in 2018, Paragraph 5)

Currently, the total accounted for homeless is half a million, just in Arizona. It's not even going down, in the quote above it rose .3 percent! To count anything as a victory i would want the number to go down. To make the number decrease further homeless need to know where shelters are.

Challenge Statement

“The homeless population of veterans in Phoenix are on the streets because they are untrained and don’t know of shelters.”

The leading cause of homelessness is housing costing too much, there isn't much in our power to change that but we can educate the homeless so they can get higher paying jobs.

What exactly is homelessness?

Homelessness is when a person has no way to have a roof over their head with running water and electricity (disregarding family)

Vision

“Welcome back from the navy steven, you are 23 and just served 5 years. You enrolled in an engineering school but it just wasn't for you. You tried to move back into your families house but that didn't work out, you tried to move to your friend's house but that only worked for a few months. It was hard finding jobs because your navy skills didn't translate well to civilian jobs. You lived in a tent for a while and ended up getting an unstable job towing cars. He trimmed trees for a while and even construction but none of the jobs he did could afford him a functional place to live. But one day a stranger told him about how Catholic Charities is providing housing and work experience at one of their shelters. He makes his way down to it and puts his life back on track. He manages to find a stable job with Catholic charities and gets his own functional house.”

(Brandt, 2018, slide 9)