I was incredibly moved by Toni Flynn’s book, “Finding My Way: A Journey Along the Rim of the Catholic Worker Movement.” Near the end of the book, she describes a moment she had in which she had to question her morals because she chose not to act when she should have. The anecdote she shares is about what she witnessed while eating an ice cream cone outside of a restaurant on the Santa Monica Pier. As she was sitting there, a homeless man approached the restaurant and began looking in the rubbish bin for something to eat. Instead of trying to assist the hungry man, one of the bartenders approached the homeless man and cruelly screamed at him to get away. The man elucidated that he was hungry and continued to look through the trash. In response, the bartender slammed the lid of the can onto the other man’s fingers. Instead of speaking out against the bartender’s actions, Toni sat there silently, stunned.

After the incident, Toni was troubled by her inability to act in the face of such blatant inhumanity. She asked herself, “what dark side of myself did I encounter? Why, witnessing an injustice, did I not act in some way to prevent such a violent, degrading incident? How can I forgive myself for committing such a gross withholding of love?” (p.53).

This quote was particularly significant to me, because it is a moment that I’m sure all of us can relate to, where we saw something wrong and did nothing to stop it. This quote reminds me of how I felt the other day. Last weekend, I was headed into a restaurant with my friend to get some lunch when we were approached by a homeless man holding window washing tools. He asked if he could clean her car windows in exchange for a few dollars. She declined his offer. He then asked us if we had any food we were willing to spare. Both of us said we did not. Once inside of the restaurant, I was overwhelmed by guilt. How dare I be so selfish as to deny another human being something as easy to accommodate as a meal? Horrified with my moral character, I quickly asked the hostess if she could expedite a to-go order so that I could provide the man with dinner. She obliged and I jogged outside to find the man so that I could offer him some food.

As I walked up to him, I witnessed him ask two other people for some spare change. Both individuals brushed him off. I greeted the man and asked if he’d be interested in some Mexican food. He seemed shocked by my offer and it took him a moment before he accepted. The two of us talked as we walked back over to the restaurant. Once there, I retrieved his dinner and he gratefully took it. As he was departing, the two men that had denied helping him earlier walked back up to him and both of them handed him a $20 bill. It just goes to show that even the smallest of gestures such as buying a hungry man some dinner can inspire others to do the right thing. I know that if I had gone on to eat my dinner without helping this man, I would’ve felt like Toni and hated myself for my inability to extend compassion to someone who needs it.

For my teaching project, I invited members of my family as well as neighbors to my home in Riverside, California. There were drinks and snacks provided. I set up rows of chairs in the living room area. Here about 15 members of my family gathered to hear me speak at the front of the room. I focused on two topics from our class. The first was breaking stereotypes. I chose this topic because stereotypes are really detrimental to the homeless. If the blame can be placed on an individual’s bad life choices, then there is never a need to question the bigger picture. This is also important because if the audience failed to understand the other aspects of the teaching project and the bigger picture, maybe at the least, this talk about stereotypes would change how they interact with the homeless and panhandlers in their own lives. The second thing I wanted to focus on was the structural causes of homelessness. The shift the blame from the individual to the structural.

I opened up the talk by introducing them to the class and what we have covered over the semester. I passed around the syllabus and some of the books that we’ve read. To dive into the subject matter, I started out by showing the audience a few short videos from Invisible people.org. This is the website that we interacted with at the beginning of the class this semester. It showed people talking in their own words about life on the street and how they got where they are. I thought this would be a better way for the ‘breaking stereotypes’ as it is easier to make a human connection with this demographic if you are hearing their stories in their own voices. There was a small discussion afterwards about their reactions to the videos. The next phase of the talk was me presenting them various aspects of the structural issues. I printed out maps, charts and some statistics that went along with my talking points. Then there was a wrap up discussion at the end. During this time, I answered any final questions. I also asked each person to write down something new they learned, a question they still had, or any sort of reflection on the topics that had been covered.

Overall, I think the event went well. The audience was engaged in discussion and really contemplated the material. Members of the audience brought up their own personal ties to certain struggles as well as issues that I did not mention. Most of them understood the structural causes but at times revealed that their view of homeless individuals were still stereotypical.

The book “Finding My Way: A Journey Along the Rim of The Catholic Worker Movement”, by Toni Flynn really hit home for me. I think that anyone who grew up in a major city has had similar experiences and felt a similar sense of confusion with as to what their role is in regards to helping those less fortunate. Sometimes it’s hard to know when the right time is to step in or help someone out, but this book did a great job of really sending the message that a situation is what you make it. Helping people needs to be something that comes from a place in your heart that wants to help. The incident with the homeless man trying to get food out of the trash can was really one that stuck out to me. That moment was so significant because it was able to change a perspective. That is what I feel so much of this course has been about. You need to see that the way that things are is wrong to finally understand your own reason behind changing yourself and your own views. My mother ran the Hollywood Mental Health Clinic for most of my childhood. Even as a child she would bring me to work with her sometimes and introduce me to the people she worked with and assisted. After watching my mother work with people from all walks of life and try as best she could to help everyone, I was fortunate enough to find my personal connection to wanting change through that. This book was a great way of showing someone else’s experience of discovering their own want and journey for that change. It highlighted an experience that was in no way similar to my own, yet the desire for change and wanting to help was very similar. These are the connections that this class has been providing us with. For everyone who didn’t have the experiences that I had as a child, the volunteer work that we did really did provide many of the student in this class with a new perspective and incentive to help others in a way that I believe this book highlighted. It promoted a new and real understanding of homelessness and then sent all of us out into the community to work for change with that knowledge as the driving force. I love this book and I love this class. It is clear to me that our perspective have been shaped through legitimate facts and empathy and that each one of us has a new found respect and desire for all of those who have been or are homeless to have the lives that they deserve. Not only is this view going to help us in understanding poverty and homelessness, I think it also instills a new faith in humanity. To have to really look at structural issues and potential failures before blaming a person for their faults or life circumstances is a added perk to the lessons taught in this class. I am happy that through the readings (especially this book) and our discussions, I now have the knowledge and perspective to properly talk about homelessness and poverty and can knowledgeably do my part to change the discourse that currently exits in the United States about homelessness.

For out teaching project, we decided the most effective way to share our knowledge and spark important conversations was through tabling in the commons. For two days we tabled in the Irvine Commons during lunch hours, laid out the brochures and documents, and offered free candy in order to attract people to our table. Together we created a brochure and coined it “The Real Face of Homelessness”. The brochure consisted of listing some of the major causes of homelessness, some statistics to emphasize the causes, and a few photos to offer a visual aspect of the data. In the brochure we included statistics about homelessness in the Redlands area and added a “What you can do to help!” section that promotes stereotype breaking, language awareness, the SOAN 324 course, and a link to local organizations individuals can volunteer their time at. Along with the brochure, we printed off the internship and volunteer list compiled on the class website for people to look at and take down numbers. In order to ground the issue in Redlands, we also printed off a document titled, “City of Redlands Indicators of Potential Homelessness”. The document offered an accurate portrayal about income distribution and housing affordability.

We chose the brochure and tabling approach because we wanted to be able to talk to people one on one and spark thought-provoking, casual conversation. Our hope was that through the brochure, students at the University of Redlands would gain a more educated opinion about causes of homelessness, what homeless people are really like, and the ways that homeless stereotypes continuously get reinforced and strengthened. Here at the University we are often shielded from the ugly truths that lay beyond the confines of the campus and it’s imperative that students are aware of the issues that plague Redlands and beyond.

Overall, our teaching effort was successful. We all worked very hard on trying to draw people to our table and spark important questions and thoughts. The most difficult thing with tabling is that even though people walk by consistently, they rarely every pay attention to the people that are in fact tabling. It was amazing how easily people can ignore the individuals lined up around the front of the commons and remain oblivious to the posters and documents spread out on the tables. Due to the amount of people that ignored us for the first twenty minutes on the first day of tabling, AJ had a great idea to buy candy in order to entice people to our table. The free candy did help draw attention, but we also realized that the statements we said to people had to be phrased in very particular ways in order for people to actually come up and talk to us. In the beginning when people passed by we would state something along the lines of, “Come learn about the real causes of homelessness and what you can do to help”. With this line, people quickly walked by. We then completely changed our approach to just yelling out, “Free Candy!” It was amazing to see how responsive people were when it wasn’t laden with information about hunger or homelessness. Once they got to the table to get free candy and realized what we wanted to talk about, most people made up excuses about being late for class or needing to run to get to work.

We also realized that it was easier to appeal to the Greek Community. Since we had print outs of all of the volunteer and internship opportunity list, we were able to pass them out to people in Greek life and ask them to pass it along to their community service chairs (since individuals involved in Greek life need to volunteer for at least ten hours a semester). An interesting experience we had was when we asked someone to take a brochure and they responded by saying, “I actually won’t read it.” It made us wonder, is it better for people to be honest and show their obvious disinterest or to be extremely receptive yet throw the brochure out as soon as they walk away from the table?

On Tuesday, April 15^th, Sam and I had the opportunity to educate and promote the issues of hunger and homelessness to the members of Alpha Xi Omicron and their friends. We had an impressive turnout of about 15 people and were pleased to see the sorority members attend with friends. Through our presentation, we hoped to spark new opportunities to attack this important issue through the community service pillar that this sorority and the rest of the Greek Life community hold dear. Our goal was not only to raise awareness of this societal issue, but also to motivate more action towards a solution starting with the university’s organizations.

Our presentation began with gaging our audience’s knowledge about what they believed homelessness to be and if it they considered it an individual or societal problem. By using a PowerPoint presentation, videos, books, and other materials we were able to give them a well-rounded overview of what this course hunger and homelessness is and what it was that we learned about.

The governmental barrier that the issue of homelessness is up against was the most upsetting to our audience. They voiced arguments that there is all this government action that they have heard and or read about. We used materials from the course to give them some answers. In just discussing these issues within the larger picture, we hoped that it would further motivate a willingness to become more active. However, what truly motivated our audience was the second part of our presentation that revolved around promoting awareness, a taste of our internship experiences, and solutions in current practice.

Since our main goal was to inform the sorority of an issue that they promote awareness and action, we showed them a video summarizing the Pilion Trust Chairty’s creative F*ck the Poor campaign as an example of a way to not only spread awareness, but also to show the problem surrounding society. We emphasized through this video that creativity is key in grabbing the attention of people who would otherwise ignore the homelessness issue.

At the end of our presentation, we both hoped that we had provided our audience with at least an ounce of the knowledge that this course has provided us and that through teaching the Alpha Xi Omicron sisterhood, the awareness of the hunger and homelessness issue in America will spread to other University of Redlands Greek and non- Greek organizations. If we have learned anything from this class, it is that awareness is the first step in addressing any issue and that is what we tried to emphasize. Our goal was to give Alpha Xi Omicron the tools to promote hunger and homelessness just as they promote awareness for RAINN and other important issues and hope that it was enough to not only make them care, but make them act. Just like the F*ck the Poor campaign slogan states, “We know you care, please care enough to give”, we want them to take it one step further and just act.

Educating is just the start in this fight against hunger and homelessness. Hopefully Sam and I have impacted and showed the reality to these lovely ladies and friends just as professor Jim Spickard has done.

Mallori Thompson just posted a short video on YouTube about Poverty Action — an organization that lobbies for better programs for poor people in Washington State.  Mallori took this course about four years ago.  She went on to social work school and is clearly dedicated to teaching others about issues of poverty and homelessness.

Poverty Action asks poor people to speak out about their experiences.  Mallori’s video presents some of those voices, letting us see the humanity of people whom the mainstream often ignores.  Click HERE to see the video (six minutes).

I’m tremendously proud of Mallori and am proud to have been her teacher.

— Jim

For our class project centered around teaching a broader audience about the challenges and hardships facing those who are homeless in our society today, I chose to hold a film screening with a discussion to follow. The film I decided to show is called “Dark Days” and is a documentary film that was made in the year 2000. This film follows the lives of 11 people living underneath Penn Station in New York City, and exposes the causes, both structural and personal, that led them to be living in the tunnels below the city. The film itself won several awards at different film festivals, including the Independent Spirit Awards and SXSW, and made a huge impact on many people, because it was one of the first of its kind. A true documentary, the film relies almost exclusively on the voices and stories of the people it follows. Little to no background information is provided throughout the film, and the viewer is given a firsthand look into the lives of those living under Penn Station. I chose this film because I thought that it had all of the elements of what we have learned so far in our class, especially the first hand account of what it’s like to be homeless, and it was interesting enough to hold the attention of people who may have little interest in the subject matter. I presented the film to a group of women in my sorority, and after the film was finished we had an open discussion about the causes behind the conditions that brought these people to that situation. Since there was a lack of information about broader causes of homelessness throughout the film, I prepared a quick synopsis of some facts and figures about homelessness to share with my friends after the film had finished. This proved to be a helpful technique because many of them had only a little knowledge of the structural causes and real facts about homelessness.

One thing we talked about for a long time during the discussion time after the film was the negative stereotypes almost always associated with homeless people, especially panhandlers. Nearly everyone there shared a story that had to do with the guilt and confusion that came with denying a homeless person money or food when they were asked. Many of my sisters talked about how they’d been taught by their parents as little girls not to give money to homeless people because “they were just going to use it for drugs”, and that placed in them a deep seeded mistrust for people asking for money on the street. One girl in particular told a story about a woman she sees nearly every day outside of a coffee shop where she works. This woman almost always comes up to my friend asking for money so that she can buy breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Sometimes my friend gives her money or offers to buy her a coffee or food, but the more she sees her the angrier she gets by her presence. My friend talked about how she couldn’t understand why this woman couldn’t just “get a job” or go somewhere else in order to make ends meet. Obviously, I didn’t have an answer for her, but we talked about the things we can do to help this woman, the main thing being that we should have compassion for everyone we meet, and that we have to change our gut reactions to homeless people. The discussion turned into a really intense talk about how we treat the people we encounter, and how we need to be truly aware of those around us, and to abide by the golden rule, to treat others how you would want to be treated.

I knew right away that when I decided to do my lesson plan in a Juvenile Hall, that I wasn’t going to teach the inmates issues about homelessness, but that I was going to increase their awareness about the issue of homelessness. This was because I knew that majority of this audience was either going to be homeless when they get out of jail or that they were already homeless before they got into jail. This was the exact reason why I knew this was going to be a teaching event where I would get the opportunity from learning from my audience as well.

I went into the hall with a presentation made on PowerPoint. I broke up each slide into different themes of homelessness. However, I first began this presentation by having everyone go around introducing themselves and then saying one word that makes them think of homelessness. Then we continued on to defining what homelessness is.

Then we moved on to discuss what the causes of homelessness are. I explained to them the differences between the two intersecting factors of homelessness which includes personal susceptibility and structural conditions. Next, we continued on to learning about how many homeless people there are in the United States. Our next slide was a discussion on how homeless individuals are counted and where these numbers come from. The final slide was a discussion on how we solve homelessness.The main programs that we discussed involved a twelve step recovery program for drug addicts and alcoholics, a dress for success program, a daily stress and anger management program, and finally a nutrition program. By concluding my presentation, I decided to show a YouTube video clip that was about a man who was pretending to be homeless. The video taper caught this man on camera, watching him ask people for money. The video taper followed this man home and knocked on his door and confronted him about the nice house he lives in, and the Mercedes he was driving home, and asked if he is lying about being homeless. This caused a great discussion between the incarcerated kids between whether or not they thought this was right or wrong. It ended up being a very good discussion

I was very pleased with how much participation I got from all of the kids throughout the entire presentation. I personally feel they really enjoyed it and I helped increase their knowledge on homelessness and I couldn’t be any happier with where and how I chose to do my teaching project. I felt that everything went smoothly during this presentation as I planned it to and this is something I would definitely do again

I did a very low key, casual presentation with my mother and my neighbor since I live at home. It consisted of a powerpoint that followed the way the class was structured, because I thought that this structure worked well for me in learning the material and it makes sense.  My presentation felt a lot like a seminar or a lecture; I did not engage my audience beyond Q&A and discussions which featured reflections about what my audience had learned.

Looking back, the most difficult aspect of this project was finding a balance between presenting too much information but still providing a broad understanding of the topic. I do not think I could have cut out parts of my outline, but perhaps could have presented it differently as opposed to talking so much. I think I should have used a petcha-kucha, or at least had a time limit on each slide (at the same time however, I had unforeseen technical problems with my phone as I was recording my presentation; I kept running out of memory on my phone and constantly had my presentation interrupted because I had to transfer pieces of it onto my computer). Ironically, my audience took these interruptions and treated them as intermissions in which they reflected amongst themselves about what I had just talked about.

Even though my presentation was like a lecture, I still consider it a success because I was able to remold my audience’s views on homelessness. At the start of my presentation, I asked my audience what they thought was the number one cause of homelessness in the US. My neighbor said substance abuse and mental illness and my mother agreed, with the added stipulation that substance abuse and mental illness are two individual causes that can prevent someone from finding work or can cause someone to lose their job. During the fortunate/unfortunate pauses in my presentation, my audience said that they were aware of the information I was providing but had never connected it with homelessness.  I repeatedly emphasized that the cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing and high rents. In addition, I asked my audience at the start what they thought of homeless people in general. To my saddened surprise (but in an ironic way, it was a good surprise), my audience viewed homeless people as dangerous or potentially violent. After the discussion about what life is like for the homeless as well as describing the negative discourses revolving around homelessness, they came to understand that the stereotypical ideas that they have held are social constructs they were conditioned to believe. Thus, I believe my project, in spite of the flaws, was successful because it actual caused learning to take place and I was able to change how they view homelessness.

I know my neighbor in particular is likely to forward this information to her own circle of friends because of how talkative and extroverted she is. She’s very passionate about current affairs and social justice, and I chose her as a member of my audience because I know she has a history of disseminating information she picks up from newspaper articles, to other friends, etc, to her own social network. In this sense, I hope the knowledge I presented will be passed around. I personally believe this is the most important part of teaching. If moved enough, people will pay knowledge forward.

We gave our presentation on Homelessness in America to our sorority sisters. Coming into our presentation some people had negative stereotypes on homeless people and some were more empathetic, but no one really knew about all of the structural causes. This was a great opportunity for us to instill in them all that we know about the structural causes of homelessness.

We first went into detail about how housing loss, job market changes, hospital closures, and lowered social supports are all structural causes, which have taken part in causing homelessness. We then posed a question for them to think about, “In what degree have these structural conditions contributed to the increase of homelessness?” We helped them to understand this question by answering it with examples of the structural causes we mentioned earlier. We quickly realized that our audience was responding well to our presentation and it seemed as if they were really grasping the concept of structural versus individual causes.

The next part of our presentation we discussed the idea of raising awareness through Point in Time (PIT) Counts. We explained that PIT Counts are counts of homeless people in cities that are conducted by volunteers. Many people seemed interested in this particular section because there were many questions about the accuracy of the PIT Counts and their results.

Our next topic was on minimum wage and we started by asking our audience, “Do you think it is possible to live off of minimum wage?” Most of them answered with no, so it seemed as if they had enough knowledge on that because they are absolutely correct. We broke down some numbers showing the weekly, monthly, and annual income of those living off of minimum wage would be. Our audience was able to see how people cannot live off of minimum wage. Another example we gave was of the Barbara Ehrenreich book, Nickel and Dimed. We gave a brief overview of Ehrenreich’s experience working for minimum wage. During this part of our presentation we saw a change in our audience, we saw them grasping the concept of homelessness and that it is a bigger problem than they could have imagined. We could see this clearly because this is exactly what we went through when we first started taking this course.

The last part of our presentation was explaining our internship this semester at The Blessing Center. However, we explained that our example at The Blessing Center is on a very micro scale that does not reduce homelessness.  The Blessing Center does not help change the structural issues that cause homelessness but it does give hope to the community.

At the end of our presentation we gave our audience an opportunity to ask any questions.  Many of the questions that were asked were about our personal opinions and this was a struggle because we did not want to give a biased opinion of what we thought were the right things. Overall we feel that we gave an informative presentation to our peers and they felt like they learned more about homelessness, which was our main goal. We believe that we raised awareness within our sorority and we hope that they saw a new side to homelessness that they were unaware of before.