Homelessness has many different faces, but the ones that come to mind are the children/youth. Transition-age youth who are exiting foster care and losing vital services are left to their own devices to survive. Youth in care become adults in shelters, adults in prison, and adults in cycles. We must be as intentional in our preventative work as we are in corrective work. It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken adults.
One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve found is that people view homelessness as a distant issue. Sometimes, if we choose not to see a problem, we can avoid its severity. We can walk past the man sleeping on flattened cardboard outside Penn Station with ease. We can overlook the woman on the subway with no shoes in December without flinching. We can say with certainty that they must’ve gone down a road that caused their situations. We have no problem placing responsibility on others while simultaneously absolving ourselves of the immense guilt.
Instead of attacking the core problem, we pivot to attack the impacted people by building hostile infrastructure, such as curves in park benches, jagged rocks under train rails, and spikes on flat surfaces. We have become too comfortable in our distorted reality that we expect those broken by the harshest of systems to be the ones to mend it. We need to shift the narrative of how we interact with homelessness. As Dr. Jamie Rife stated on an episode of the Elevated Denver Podcast, “Homelessness is not the issue. It is the outcome of all other systems failing at once.” I would urge people to look at the broken road of factors instead of the final destination of debris.
There are many programs designed to help the problem after it’s happened but not many focus on being intentionally proactive. Nyasha’s Promise is a community organization I founded that is designed to eliminate barriers to accessing essential items for newborns born of mothers experiencing housing instability. We do that through educational workshops, introducing local community resources, and providing essential items. The goal is to limit the adverse effects of poverty and homelessness by giving predominantly marginalized mothers-in-transition the items, resources, and opportunities to be successful pre- and post-birth.
If we give young mothers in foster care and mothers in shelters the tools to help lessen the financial toll a newborn comes with, we contribute greatly to their long-term success. Mothers choosing to carry to term can do so without the looming thought of how they will be able to provide such vital expensive things. Through Nyasha’s Promise, I host baby showers for mothers experiencing housing instability/insecurity and provide them with essential items such as strollers, wipes, diapers, hygiene products, onesies, and socks. Traditionally, baby showers are used to celebrate the life that will soon enter the world. Baby showers have become an exclusive symbol of status but should be used as an inclusive vehicle for necessities. By hosting these baby showers, we begin to strip away the stigma of how moms in shelters are viewed as problems and instead treat them as valuable people.
Housing instability and insecurity is not always a consequence of an action. We have become so desensitized to the realities of homelessness and reserve our sympathy for the holidays. That is not enough. Distance breeds lack of empathy, and closeness can curate compassion. We will inadvertently blame the disadvantaged, if we continue to look at homelessness through the lens of shame.
