I am a mission driven person and it warms my heart to see the compassion and heart everyone has for helping others. Our work is not easy. We are often dealing with people that are in extreme crisis and with that comes all sorts of behaviors that can make our work more complicated and even triggering for us. This work can burn us out if we are not careful.

One of the early mistakes we made was assuming homeless individuals will not have cars. They came to our tiny house village without much, including cars.

They didn’t have a job and had little to no income, so how would they get a car?

Too many homeless campgrounds or tiny house villages are fenced in with a chain-link fence. It is an affordable way to get up and running, but leaves little privacy for the participants in the program.

When building a team for a homeless program it is vital to select employees who are street-smart.

These are the people who have been homeless, had addictions, and been on the wrong side of the law, yet have been pulled out of the well of homelessness, restored their lives, and have a passion to help the next person who is in the same situation as they were.

In another blog, we highlighted the “Secret Sauce” for helping homeless individuals escape homelessness. In that “Secret Sauce,” there is a “Secret Ingredient” that makes the sauce tastier or for this blog: successful. What is the ingredient? Life-Skills meetings.

There is an old story about a person who was walking along a big river one day. While looking out at the water he saw a body floating by. The person was alive, but barely. The spotter jumped into the river to rescue the person. He pulled the body to shore and immediately started to assess the condition and figure out what treatment needed to be done. He went for help and soon there were others there to help the half-dead person.

During the pandemic, toy sales grew as people were isolated at home. Much of the increased sales were being done by adults. That created an awe ha moment for the toy industry. Toy companies began to say: “We’re not in the kids' business. We are in the play business. And anyone can play.”

Senior homelessness is on the rise and it will become daunting if we don’t do something about it. Currently, there are 10,000 people turning 65 and retiring every day. Most, due to low wages over the past 40 years, get low benefits. And, since they had low-paying jobs with no retirement benefits beyond Social Security, they were not able to set aside additional funds for retirement.

Experts have determined there is a 5-level process a homeless person takes to move from being in crisis (totally dependent on others) to thriving (self-sufficient). At the crisis level the participant needs a hand-out (they have no resources to take care of him/herself), but moving forward the participant needs a hand-up by education, motivation, and inspiration to develop the skills to become self-sufficient.

One day a wise director of a local foundation told us we were not in the housing business, but in the business of changing lives. Our supportive services program with five levels and steps to follow in each level was our “secret sauce.”

There is an old saying: “Feed a person a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a person to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”

A successful homeless program will not exist to warehouse the homeless, but to move them forward to self-sufficiency. This means they are leaving a subsidized life behind with all the hand-outs. To stay in poverty and be dependent on subsidies takes the heart out of people and traps their future.

Years ago when we first started working to serve the homeless we had three basic beliefs.

We believed:

1. We serve the needs of the community by assisting the homeless get a hand up on their journey from homelessness to stability. …

There are five major myths about homelessness

1. The homeless have caused their own situation and deserve to live in it.
2. The homeless are basically lazy and don’t want to change.
3. The homeless are all criminals and scary. …