Help the homeless get off the streets – don’t encourage their behavior

We love the homeless to death.

I live in Portland, Oregon and have been working directly with the homeless for nonprofits for two decades. And I realized that we were letting them down.

We feed and clothe the homeless, but provide no other meaningful support to prepare them to leave the streets. Advocates justify behaviors such as drug use, theft, and crime between people because the homeless are the victims.

However, the more I did outreach, the more I realized that we were creating an addiction. The homeless have gone from hoping to be fed to waiting to be fed. They needed help with clothes, transportation, phone calls, camp cleaning, etc. They stopped trying.

I remember a client who called himself Yuta. He was in his late thirties and lived in the doorway of an old dance studio under Hawthorne Bridge. It had piles of rubbish piled around the doorway and only a small hole to climb through. I delivered food and supplies to him every other day for several months. I went on vacation and returned a few weeks later to find him barely alive. I had to climb into the hole and wake him up. He did not drink water or eat food for several days. He told me he was waiting for me to bring it to him.

That’s when I realized that I was part of the problem.

Are we helping them or harming them? My employers insisted that our job was to provide for their basic needs, and that the end of homelessness could not happen until a major shift in society made us all equal.

That’s not why I got into social services. I wanted to make a difference right now. I wanted to help these people not only survive, but thrive.

We’ve all heard the saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” This is what we needed to do. It was empowerment.

I used this new approach with a client who lived in a tent near a homeless shelter for six years. I gave him the responsibility and set out the expectations. I told him I wanted to help him sober up, get a job and get off the streets. As he embraced my new approach, I witnessed a change in his energy and behavior. He began to take his sobriety seriously and began to promote his well-being. Every day I saw improvement.

But his newfound power didn’t mean I wasn’t needed anymore. To go out, the homeless need help through our complex social service system. This is what a good teacher would do to a struggling student: give guidance and encouragement and never give up.

Over the next two months, my client recovered, moved into a temporary housing program, and found a job. Eventually, he went back to college and got his degree. Married with children and living in a home, he is now a functional part of our community with responsibilities, expectations and rewards. We need to change our approach. Thousands of people are languishing and dying every day – and this will continue if we do nothing.

We will end this humanitarian crisis not with big budgets or unrealistic utopian fantasies, but by empowering people to reach their fullest potential.

Kevin Dahlgren is a leading homelessness expert exposing the dysfunction of our social service system.

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