Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: donations, half a million dollars, homeless shelter, volunteer
It seems that I have only come to realize how several of my friends work in the nonprofit sector. It is an amazing, often thankless job that it can feel like only they truly understand what it is like to give time to a worthy cause. One friend works for a group that runs the largest homeless shelter in the city. Perhaps one of my favorite parts of first coming to an organization is hearing the list of statistics that the person in charge knows by heart and spouts off effortlessly. Don’t think that it is without passion, however, or they wouldn’t be working there at all.
The numbers today were no less impressive as at other places. Over 2000 people spend time in his shelters a year, while last year they were able to help 420 people find a job and a place to live. These are considered the success cases, the ones that were able to turn their life around and become self-sufficient again. There are so many reasons why people wind up at the shelter but even he admitted that many of them were due to substance abuse and/or mental instabilities.
He showed me around both the men’s shelter and the family center where women and children stay and introduced me to different staff members who were much more upbeat than I thought they might be. I am constantly being shown how wrong my viewpoint of the world can be and I am grateful for it; it would be a terrible thing to live in constant disconnect from the world around you. His initial desire was for me to just spend time with the “guests” at the family center, as he called them, by playing games or just hanging out. But as most people politely declined his offer to start a game, I thought that perhaps they were a bit intimidated by a new face. Many of these women appeared as though they could live down the street from me, particularly a much older woman my mother’s age who was so well-dressed I thought that she must be volunteering as well. She wasn’t.
As I drove home I thought about another statistic my friend had told me. The shelter offers breakfast and dinner everyday to not only shelter inhabitants but anyone else off the streets who might come in. This food comes entirely from individual donations up to chain restaurants and the preparation/serving is all done by volunteers; this entire process saves the organization half a million dollars per year. This is an absolutely astounding figure, one that I couldn’t help but roll around in my head while we walked around the facilities. I wanted to organize a food drive that moment and thought to the street where my mother lives as a possibility. Until I realized, with sadness, that the people there would most likely be of the mindset as to believe that people at the shelter were not worthy of help. It is a sad world we live in when you can watch people spend five dollars on a coffee but will turn their noses up at their fellow human being in need.
Sometimes I think if celebrities didn’t do TV ads for tragic events like Katrina and the Haiti victims, people wouldn’t give their money at all.
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