You must have seen homeless people squattering around the city roads and parks. These filthy and smelly homeless people receive disgust from society and a dollar or two from some individuals. Government have systems to bring them back to mainstream but those are not enough. These people need love and attention to start living normal life.
One can get involved in lot ways to help these homeless peoples through a not-for-profit organisations or individually. It is great feeling to improve the life of a homeless person in terms of a house, food, clothes, & more.
When you aid someone on the street with money, it gives only a temporary relief but problem still remain there. Donating to Not-for-profit organizations means your money goes a long way and support the homeless peoples in most efficient way. Although government schemes are available to help these homeless peoples but they are reluctant to move away from streets. One of the effective approach is to help these people in phases.
Phase 1 – Food: The only source of food for these homeless peoples is dustbins and leftover food thrown by general public. Eating from the dustbins is huge health risk. These bin are full of disease causing germs and viruses. By providing fresh, hot and healthy meal not only keep them away from diseases but improve their health also.
Phase 2 – Clothing: These homeless people have hardly any clothes to change and wear same clothes for months. This not only makes them dirty and smelly but raise the risk of skin diseases. On the other hand we discard lot of cloth into bins which ends up in landfills. Though a proper planning, we can sort and clean these clothes to help these homeless people with clothing.
Phase 3 – Cleaning: Lack of amenities for personal hygiene adds to the already pathetic conditions homeless peoples. Even if they find public bathrooms, they don’t have toiletries like soap, tooth paste, tooth brush, shampoos for proper person hygiene. These item cost only few bucks per person but goes a long way in keeping oneself clean and build the confidence.
Phase 4 – Shelters: Once we have won their confidence and build some rapport with them, we motivate them to move to proper shelter. We coordinate our efforts with the welfare department to expedite and streamline this process.
Phase 5 – Skill Development: Last and most important step is building confidence in them. We help these peoples with skill development and job placement. Once they start earning consistently, there are very slim chances of them falling back.
You can involve with this cause in form of donations, contributions, charity, and grants. We assist people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in the followings ways:
- Ground team: These are our soldiers who do all the risky work on ground. Working with homeless people is not an easy job, a lot of them are drug addicts or mentally unstable. Ground team volunteers need to be patient but at same time alert for any situation.
- Office team: This team is responsible for smooth running of the whole operation. They coordinates the activities of volunteers working on the ground with homeless people, government department and other resources. They also make and handle fundraising calls.
- Online team: Two kind of activities are carried out by our online volunteer team, first is sharing our activities on social media and digital media platforms to spread the awareness. Second is promoting fundraising campaign on social media platforms.
- Fundraising team: We raise funding through online crowd funding campaigns, direct mail order for donation, social media campaigns and fundraising events. As fundraising volunteer, you can help with any of these operations.
So there are ample of opportunities to suit your way of volunteering. As it is said that we are as strong as our weakest link and these homeless people are weak link of our society. We can be happy only when people in our society are happy. A small gesture of generosity can save or improve someone’s life and bring extraordinary differences in society.