The People Among Us (Shelter Connection Review)

I really enjoyed the way the Shelter Connection team went about their project. They are starting out local, but left huge opportunity to expand to a more national aspect. It was very well presented and they took everything they did extremely serious because this is an extremely prevalent struggle for those in our community. Not even a week ago I saw homeless people sleeping on a slab of foundation for a building. If this team product would have been around there is a much higher chance this homeless man would have been able to find somewhere to stay for the night rather than sleeping outside in the open. It would terrify me to do what these people do on a daily basis, so this teams idea is not just something that they think is a hard hitting issue. I thought it was a really good idea to allow donations for food to be given out in the form of vouchers for the homeless people to take to places to eat.

The homeless population is always growing, it seems, as our economic problems to continually force employers to lay off employees. We shouldn’t blame this growing number on the homeless population, but rather we should put in place a better system for employers to know whether or not their laying off of certain employees will cause them extreme harm. This would help a lot in fighting the homeless epidemic.

The Shelter Connection team did a great job presenting the subject and informing their audience about this very tricky subject that no one wants to talk about. I’m personally still hung up on making the project more personal by spotlighting certain homeless people to increase cash flow. Why not play on people’s emotions to help a cause for other starving, scared people in our local area? Other organizations do this all the time for dogs and cats. Why would it be such a bad thing for us to do the same thing except using people. They did hit on this question during the Q&A session, and they responded very well. They said that this may cause exploitation of these people. Which would look good on paper for the organization, but the actual homeless people may come under some fire because they will forever be labeled as that one homeless person from a T.V. ad. I can see why this could turn bad, but for some reason I still feel like it would bring more awareness aboutA the subject to our community and create a much needed cash flow for the subject.