For my teaching project, I decided to head down to Costa Mesa, California to do my presentation. This took place at my mom’s preschool, A Child’s Place, with the audience bang made up of the eight to ten teachers who work at the preschool. My presentation consisted a number of parts; one being made up of statistics that I have gathered and four others that talked about specific aspects of homelessness. After the presentation of information, I took a few questions from the audience that ranged from bringing up new information to clarifying and going deeper in other information that was said. Because I was presenting at a preschool to the teachers that work there, I decided to tailor parts of my presentation to the aspects of homelessness of children. This would be more relevant and beneficial to my audience.

I broke my presentation down into five different sections. The first section focused on the children aspect of homelessness and talked about the variety of statistics that I had found. In 2011, there were 1,168,354 homeless children that were enrolled in preschools and K-12 programs. This was a 10% jump over the previous year and a 72% increase since the recession in 2008. The percentages of where these children are living are 71% “doubled up” (they share housing situations with others), 15% in shelters, 6% hotels/motels, and 4% are unsheltered. There are one in 45 children that will experience homelessness in America each year. This means that there ill be over 1.6 million children affected. Some other statistics showed how these children have health issues more often than other children and are more exposed to violent situations.

Next I talked about the causes of homelessness and I broke it down into what I consider the five biggest parts. These were the economy, cost to own/rent a house, spousal abuse, drugs, and arrests.

Homeless counts was the next topic and I focused on how these counts are not always done the right way. There really is not an accurate number of how many homeless people there are in any given area. If a city puts enough resources into it they may be able to come up with a more accurate number, but if they do that they then have to spend more into helping the homeless. A lot of cities ignore this then so they do not have to provide services.

I brought up what I thought the best way was to combat homelessness, which was with affordable housing. There was a city back east that bought a building which they allowed homeless to live in if they put 30% of their “income” into (disability payment, social security, etc.) and the rest was paid by public and private grants. They then look at a variety of figures the next year and found surprising results. There was about 95% reduction in arrests throughout the people living there because they had a home to hang out in. Also there was about three million dollars saved by the city through the Emergency Room because the homeless living there were not getting as sick as often and were then not clogging up the ER with their illness problems.

Lastly I talked about my experience with the volunteer work that I have done this semester. I worked at the Central City Lutheran Mission and talked about my experience in working at the daily free meal, the after-school program, and in the men’s shelter.
I felt that I actually did a great job with my presentation to these teachers. It was really easy to speak to them and they responded with some though-provoking questions afterward. I learned a great amount more through researching the statistics about the homeless children and felt that I conveyed this and the other information well. Overall I felt like this presentation was a success.