Recent world news has focused on the murder of freshman Haruka Weiser at The University of Texas Austin.  A surprise to many a few days after the murder they found the murderer and he is a homeless teenager.  Although we do criminalize homeless people we usually do not associate them as murderers.  Typically the crimes we think of are theft and different petty crimes, but not murder.  So the main question many people are asking is why?  She seems to be an innocent freshman college student so what happened to end her life on that given Sunday evening.

Another surprise about Meechail, the homeless seventeen year old, is that he was new to the city of Austin.  Most of the time when we see homeless we can associate them as being a part of that given community for most of their lives and rarely are new to the city.  Sadly, the autopsy can report that there was blunt trauma.  Many are concluding that this young boy had serious mental issues.  After police looked back into his possible history they see he was an angered foster child and he said, “What I want to leave behind is my name — I want them to know who Meechaiel Criner is.”  So the big question is still why?  Unfortunately we will probably never have an answer.

I have had the honor to work and intern at Redlands Family Services this semester. Redlands family services have many different services it offers to its clients. It is not a homeless shelter, but is a foundation like service to help teach at risk and low-income families life skills. They offer food support, rent support, bus passes, motel vouchers, clothing, as well as many different classes to help them build different skills. During my twenty hours of working I had the opportunity to work in different areas of service. From the clothing room, to different food options I was moving around every week.

The clothing room is somewhere where each family that is a client is allowed to go every two weeks for age appropriate clothing for their family. They are allowed five items per family member as well as are able to browse for twenty minutes if they have a family of four and an additional five minutes per each family member that exceeds four. This room was organized as best as possible, but with the excess amount of donations they receive and the few volunteers that work in this area it is difficult to keep everything in an orderly manner.

Redlands family service has many different food options they offer mostly to its clients and one option that is for anyone in the community. The option that anyone in the community is allowed to use is the hot breakfast and dinner option. This is offered Monday through Friday for breakfast and Monday through Thursday for dinner. Although not very many people off of the streets that are not clients do attend they are allowed to, which is the only area of Redlands family services that they will not turn you away if you are not a registered client.

Food emergency kits are a little different and it offers clients food to feed their family for seven days, three meals each day. This is typically given to new clients or clients in a crisis situation. This is not a service all clients have access to and the clients that do have access do not have it regularly. On the other hand food surplus is available for clients each and every day. This consists of food items that are reaching close to the expiration date.

All in all I think Redlands Family Services is doing great things for the community. I think on the side of managing volunteers they are extremely unorganized and I feel this is due to them being understaffed. I like their philosophy that they are there to help build these peoples skills and not to enable them to stay in the same situation they arrived in, but they want the to grow as people and as a family each day.

Why do you think people end up on the streets? This morning I was researching common myths people seems to have about homeless people because this seems to be such a hot topic in our course throughout the entire semester. I came along an article in the LA Times written by Adam Murray on December 31, 2015. Although this was written a few months ago the content seems to still be very true today. He discusses the four myths people have specifically about the homeless people in Los Angeles. The first myth described is the idea that these people want to live on the streets. Yes, there are people who do not want to take charity from others or do not want to live in shelters, but he describes that is different from wanting to stay on the streets. The second myth people make about homeless people in LA is that they want to come and be homeless in LA due to our nice weather. Although this is a reasoning many people homeless or not come to California it is not likely that once homeless these people made the trek out to California, most likely they already lived here prior to becoming homeless. The third myth is that most homeless people are mentally ill. As we have discussed in our class this is a reasoning for people becoming homeless, but not the only reason. The final myth he discusses and my personal favorite myth is that it is too expensive to get all of these people out of homelessness. In one of my previous blog posts I discussed how housing first is actually much cheaper in the long run than the expenses that arise with so many people living on the streets.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1231-murray-myths-about-la-homelessness-20160101-story.html

As I am sure many of you have facebooks. Recently trend at least on my facebook is a short one to two-minute video about a Canadian city that beat homelessness. They follow the housing first idea, which one man in the video talks about. They discuss and show in this video that in the long run it is more beneficial in many ways to get these homeless people off the streets. Continual spending will be happening if people are living on the streets where it can take only about $20,000 a person to build them somewhere to live.

In terms of housing first getting these homeless people off the streets and then working with them to become sober and working people of society is the best way. It is hard to motivate someone to want to stop doing drugs while they reside under a park bench, where if they are given a taste of a better life they may want to get better and work towards that from the safety of their own home and space.

Many people knowledgeable about homelessness would agree with this housing first idea, where those who do not know much about this group of people think it would be too expensive and it is not their problem. We are knowledgeable and it is our duty to help other people become knowledgeable so we can help and solve homelessness one city or town at a time.

After researching the Los Angeles county homeless count for 2014 I was very surprised with how many homeless are accounted for, but in reality am still questioning how many were not accounted for. In November of 2015 the LA Times newspaper released an article discussing the homeless issue we have in LA and the surrounding areas. To my surprise LA has the largest homeless people count and accounts for one-third of the entire countries homeless people. Yes we may think well of course if you are homeless why would you not want to be in California due to our nice weather and beaches could be a nice place to sleep right? But in reality maybe there are better reasons why we have so many homeless, maybe it is because we are not doing anything to help them.

After reading the LA Times article it is very obvious the people who reside in the LA area are not willing to help the homeless because of bad experiences with them. Many just want them out of sight so they are not around where they live. In reality to do this we need to build them affordable housing so they do not have to live on the streets because in most cases that is not what they want to be doing, but what they have to for the time being. This article discusses how they want to end chronic homelessness by 2017, which realistically is impossible unless they are going to start building low income housing everywhere. What can you do to help?

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-homeless-national-numbers-20151120-story.html

Compared to my everyday routine, today was an early morning. Being a college student I typically roll out of bed around 8:45-9:00 to get to my 9:30 class, although I realize this is unrealistic in the real world currently in my life this is my reality. Today was an earlier morning than normal because I woke up at 7:00 to be at my internship at Redlands Family Services by 8:00 AM.

I had to duty of preparing and serving breakfast to the people who would arrive at 9:00. I helped prepare pancakes, potatoes as well as setting out bagels and numerous options for drinks. When the people arrived to eat they would all sign in and then come to be served. Unlike most days there were many children because today there was no school so the food went fast. Every person I gave food to were very thankful for what they were receiving, which helped make my early wake up call much more rewarding.

Although Redlands Family Service is typically only for people who are registered with them and not a walk in help sort of service, anyone including the homeless are allowed to come in for breakfast and dinner. Today there were no random walk ins, but maybe the next time I volunteer and help with breakfast there will be.

The second task I took for the day was to organize the weekly breakfast, lunch and dinner bags. These are bags of groceries for families who need emergency help. One interesting thing I learned while doing this was how they like to bag the food in the same grocery bags. For example with one grouping of food use all Vons bags and another can be Albertsons bags. At first I did not understand the point of this and then it was explained to me that they organize the food in this way so when the parents go home the children can believe there parents went to the grocery store to buy those products and not that they got them for free.

Have you ever volunteered? If so what have you done? I had the opportunity this morning to volunteer my time at Redlands family services. This is something I will continue doing these next couple of weeks. Today being my first day I got to experience the clothing room and if you haven’t ever been to thrift store they can be kind of crazy and messy sometimes. This was no different; there were stacks of clothing everywhere, which was very frustrating to say the least.

After one hour of hanging and organizing clothes the customers started to arrive. This lightened the mood up because they were so grateful of what they were able to take and all of the behind the walls things we could offer for them, specifically if they had babies.

The process of them receiving the clothes was interesting to me. Each person is allotted fifteen minutes to shop around then they much check out. They are also allowed to take fifteen items per family member they have along with one pair of shoes for each person. They are allowed to come in for clothes every two plus weeks. When they enter someone working takes there slip, which has family member information and when the checkout the number of clothing pieces they take is counted and recorded. There could be faults in this, but to me it seemed pretty reasonable and would not lead to many issues.

If you have never volunteered your time I highly encourage you to do so. It can open up your train of though to think in a way you may not have previously. These people brightened my mood and helped me realize I have so much and cannot get upset over small things.

What is money? What does it get you? If you only had $2 a day to live off of how would you survive? These are questions many of us do not know the answer to because our lives are privileged and we do not have to face the problem of not having enough. The book $2 A Day by Katherine Edin and Luke Shaefer shows the struggles of how to survive off of $2 a day.

In short the struggles the people in the stories go through are how to apply for welfare and also qualify to get welfare/food stamps, because if you did not know welfare is pretty much extinct. Other struggles these people face are finding a safe place for them and their family to live. Specifically in one story a mother and her two children were living with her uncle and she came home to her uncle raping her daughter so they went from having a home (even though it was unsafe) to being back on the streets.

In addition imagine you are ten years old again…what would be your biggest concern at that time in your life? For one of the people in this book her parents had left her alone on the streets at the age of ten and she had to figure out how to live and grow up. This to me was a reality check that nothing in my life is that bad and horrible and that when I have a bad day I need to take a step back and realize my problems are very miniscule compared to most peoples.

How far would you go to survive if you had $2 a day? The conclusions these people come up with are extreme. So…what would you do?

Who has hope? What is hope? These are some of the discussion questions we looked and evaluated over this week. Due to being raised in a wealthy family and having a very privileged life so far when I first think of hope I think of phrases such as, “I hope I get a 4.0 in this class.” Or “I hope I swim fast in the swim meet I have this weekend.” These are the hopes of a privileged twenty year old.

After this past week in class I think of hope on another level. Hope now means to have faith that there are positive things ahead and that life will turn around. Many of the stories from the website, invisiblepeople.tv.blog were of people that seemed to have hope. In many of the videos they ask the homeless person if they had three wishes what would they be. By them being able to answer this question it showed they had hope. If they would have come up blank when asked about wishes it would show they have given up all hope of a better future.

Hope has many different levels depending on whom you are talking to. To privileged people hope is not something with much meaning, while to less privileged people hope is one of the only things they do have. When you have nothing physically, mentally you can have hope that will help you get through each day because of the hope there will be a bigger and brighter tomorrow.