Individuals Struggle. Communities Help Each Other

Dave's BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) If you want to transform your community, leverage community. In other words, create opportunities and design places which encourage community. The social effect is enormous!

When I lost my daughter to cancer, I learned a valuable truth... the community of support around me and my family, kept us surviving. It was not my strength or resolve. I wanted to crawl away and hide. So did my wife. We both agreed later that had we not had such a strong community of support, AND THE PEOPLE WE BELONGED TO, we would have been homeless and addicted. But we had people around us, we belonged to them, they relied on us, we relied on them. The community was amazing.

It doesn't take much mental ascent to realize that people experiencing homelessness are seeking a community of support for the same reasons. They have lost everything important to them. And they still need to belong, they need people to rely on and be relied upon. They have nothing else.

The key to changing the picture of homelessness is moving the despair, poverty and charity away from tented encampments and instead to thriving communities designed around safe places, work, and peer-support communities.

Create Opportunities, Design Intentional positive connections, the result is dignity and recovery. An encampment is nothing more than a negative community. Keep the community, replace negative with positive, the result is transformation.

By the way, some folks are leading here, learn more about their approach's: