Just Regular Folks

 

The other day at a morning men’s bible study I was speaking to one of my regular table mates. We were discussing how easy it is to become homeless after a personal or professional failure. This is especially true after this last economic recession we’ve been experiencing these last 4 or 5 years. People living paycheck to paycheck or those who are unemployed and their savings if any or support networks dry up and become homeless.

Fortunately for a few, they don’t remain homeless for long. Among the homeless service agencies, programs were in place to assist the chronically homeless with training, education, legal assistance and medical assistance to allow them to rise above their homeless condition. Lately some of the funding for the assistance programs geared towards the chronically homeless are being diverted into new programs that concentrate on rapid re-entry for the newly homeless. Obviously, this puts an additional strain on an already strained system.

The up side of all this is that it costs less in time and money to return many of these newly homeless back into being productive individuals. Maybe not at a level they once were at, but off the streets.

The downside is many fold. Firstly, funding that was, in the past, established for the chronically homeless is being used for the newly homeless. The same applies to medial services, re-education or retraining, housing and all the other services necessary to fight chronic homelessness.

Truthfully it looks good when a homeless agency can get anyone off the street. The problem is when only the easy cases get the bulk of the attention to achieve larger success numbers.

Once again the chronic homeless and most importantly the unsheltered homeless get lost in the shuffle. Services for these people get reduced or redirected. It’s an unavoidable fact. On top of that, services across the board are being threatened with funding cuts and in some cases eliminated altogether. Just listen to the budget talks at all levels of government these days.

Here is where I can put in a plug on how you can help.

Talk to your government representatives from the federal government on down. Do volunteer work with the agencies set up to help the homeless. This can be through your church or through some other homeless service organization. Even simple donations to these organizations can make a difference. You can even adopt a homeless person as I’ve talked about in the past. I realize that among the chronically homeless there are individuals who abuse the system but for the sake of the ones who truly need the system lets not divert or eliminate that help.