For mine and Sally’s teaching project, our vision was to tackle common stereotypes of the homeless population. As we have learned in class and from personal experiences at our internships and elsewhere, society in general has a negative image of those who are without a home or living through poverty despite the fact that it is not the fault of these individuals. The consensus in our capitalistic culture is to label these individuals as “lazy” or “deviant”, because blaming the individual is far less terrifying than the realization that as a society we are failing to prevent this problem. The ideas about homeless persons being at fault or to blame are far too prevalent and show a significant lack of understanding of structural issues that contribute to poverty. This is why we sought out to show our peers the real story of homelessness that is not often heard with the end goal to raise awareness.

In order to successfully carry out our teaching project, we thought that it would be beneficial to offer new information in a unique and attention-grabbing way. We complied shocking facts, quotes, and statistics which we placed on small cards and handed these to people as they walked in and out of the commons. Our goal was to distribute short cards that offered information versus any lengthy information that was too overwhelming. Over the course of two days, we were able to hand out nearly 200 of these fact cards. The people that we were able to hand cards to read them with their friends or alone and the overall response was shock.

As a follow-up, we also assembled a list of local organizations that many of our classmates have been able to get involved with for the internship portion of the course. Offering the chance to get involved in alleviating homelessness was a significant portion of our teaching project. While simply giving out information regarding homelessness is significant, we felt is was important to include options for outreach. Many people seemed curious about these agencies and how they could get involved.

One of the downsides to our project was the depression that it caused among our peers. While we did have a list of agencies which offer ways to get involved to give people the hope that they can change the situation for the better, the simple fact is that teaching about poverty is not a cheerful subject. In retrospect, to prevent such feelings of despair, we could have given facts about the impact that some people are making every day in the lives of the homeless.

Although our teaching project had some faults, overall we were pleased with the success of our project and the impact that we were able to make. Only after this teaching project did we become aware of how much information we had learned over the course of this semester. I know that we will continue to share our knowledge to others because it is a really rewarding experience.