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.