SUSTAINABLE HOMELESSNESS

MY STORY

How I started this project, I was asked by a cousin Jody Gillies to see if I would like to come down and volunteer and feed the homeless. Jody was working with Ronica and a few other volunteers under the umbrella of Manaki Tangata where each family would cook a dish for the homeless community every Sunday morning in Hamilton. I absolutely felt for these people straight away and wanted to know their story and what they wanted to do in life. Over the course of time they started to talk to me about their life and how they got to this point of being homeless and what they want in their future. 

So I did some research and there were services like the Salvation Army, St Vincent De Paul, The Peoples Project, Te Runanga O Kirikiriroa - Mental Health & Addiction Services, Manaki Tangata with Ronica and The Serve that did a great job at feeding, clothing, rehabilitation, housing and continued help services. So giving from these wonderful charity organisations has been awesome but the problem is just too big. So upon thinking about why we still have a considerable homeless population that seems to be growing as I see new faces all the time, it dawned on me a proverb I heard when I was a young lad, “give a man a fish and you feed him for the day, give a man a rod and teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. Just maybe I thought to myself I need to empower this community to freedom and help them with solutions they wanted to implement.

So what I did to start to empower this community to freedom was start a leadership group and we have had meetings where we came together and put ideas together which I have placed in a clickup project management R&D plan. What I have noticed as I have worked with the leadership group, they are very capable, very knowledgeable, they have a lot of heart for one another and they have the solutions to most of their problems. Most of the homeless people I have talked to and the leadership group has talked with want jobs, a permanent roof over their heads with food in the cupboards and to be reconnected with their families. The homeless community isn’t asking for a lot but what hasn't escaped my eyes and the leadership group is that among the homeless community there is a serious problem with alcohol abuse, drug abuse and mental problems which the leadership group have noted as a way for some of the homeless community to escapism from their situation of no real hope, normalization as though its accepted, sometimes it's peer pressure and survival mode to keep them warm and alert. 

So I put my thinking cap on and said how can we get people with no hope, checked pasts, mental issues and all the issues we've discussed as a leadership group with nothing and bring in a plan to help this homeless community. I thought a weekend wananga (team building) at a Marae or Community Centre would be a great start for a team building program. Our program would look at 3 key steps and they include: The first step is we needed to understand the history, needs & wants and future goals of our homeless member.  The second step is finding the help services that can have an immediate positive impact in helping our homeless member. The third step is we work with our member to build his or her sustainable future to freedom. I feel the 1st and 2nd steps most charity organisations already provide and as I have talked with the leadership group they also mentioned a lot have done rehab but where the system fails this community is their sustainable future, where they have a real job and income to support their life in a community engagement setting.

If the weekend wananga (team building) at a Marae or Community Centre was a success for our homeless members we would have work ready to start on the following Monday with our Micro Business where for half a day our homeless members would work and the other half of the day they would be educated in life skills, engaging with the community, asking for help, working as a team, cooking to live (master chef), learn passive income streams like network marketing and sales and lastly we as a community look after one another. For the first 3 months its part time work, part time course and we would help with a living wage. After 3 months we hope we have our members in full time work with us and after 6 months to a year we want to help our members start businesses in the field they would like with continued support mentoring from our end. A lot of our homeless have been on the streets for a very long time so we understand we will need to be patient and the process may take longer while also managing there will be lapses and we need to be there to help them stay the course with our continued help and support services.

How can everyday members of the community help our organisation to be sustainable? Its easy, help us fundraise for work equipment that lets our homeless community start Micro Businesses like lawn mowing, cleaning, labouring, etc. The equipment we are fundraising for includes 2 x Mini Buses, 5 x Working Vans, 5 x Working Trailers, 5 x Lawn Mowers, 5 x Air Blowers, 5 x Whipper Snippers, Gardening Tools, Power Tools, Safety Equipment, Safety Clothes, 5 x Commercial Vacuums, 2 x Commercial Carpet Shampoo Machine, 2 x Commercial Washing Machines, 2 x Commercial Dryers, 30 x Basic Laptops, 30 x Mobile Phones, 5 Mountain Bikes, 1 x Music Equipment/Studio, 1 x Clothes Printing Machine and Initial Working Capital. What this equipment and initial working capital does is empower this community to start working and create long term sustainable incomes. If you feel you can donate to our cause please press our givealittle link https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/sustainable-homelessness, any donation would be very appreciated.

The leadership group and I will be promoting our Micro Businesses to our family members, friends and the wider community. We already have friends who have contacts within the community to start a lot of our Micro Businesses at scale. The focus is to get as much community engagement as possible to get us to do your lawn mowing, cleaning, labouring, etc so we create an ecosystem where the services we provide creates a real income and a sense of worth for our homeless community to rehabilitate, engage with the community and build a sustainable future.

To ensure we give our supporters who donate transparency with our cause, we will add you to our google sheets ledger system where you will be updated at least once every 24 hours on all transactions either for donations coming in to how we spend the donations and at the end of every month they will be saved as a block and linked as a chain. This is similar to how a blockchain works on keeping records of every transaction, that way everyone on the supporters system (google sheets ledger system) can see what we do and how we help the homeless community to recovery projects, work projects, passive income projects, help feed and clothe projects, educational projects, charity projects to supporting the organisational operations and its sustainability. Also depending on your donation value into our system we will be giving away good will badges to you in our google sheets ledger system in the hope we can build a future blockchain reward system for our valued supporters.

Lastly we leave the door open for like minded people who care for the homeless, the opportunity to run this program in their own communities. Call or Message us Today on 0210 834 5138 or Contact Us Online for further information.