Stand Up For Kids provides services to homeless youth. We go where they are, ask them what they need, and give them what we have. Sometimes they need food, water, clothing, and hygiene products. Other times they need job leads. Often they just want to talk. We also run a drop-in center, a place where the youth can shower, wash their clothing, use the internet, watch a movie, and eat a warm meal.
But all this requires money and other resources. As one might guess, the economic meltdown of recent years increased the number of homeless youth. On any given night in 2008, there were 87 youth on the streets of Phoenix. That number rose to 121 in 2009, and to 180 in 2010. Two years has seen a nearly doubling in the homeless youth population.
As one might also imagine, charitable donations go down when everyone starts losing money. While our need rises, our resources dwindle.
In a conversation with John, the Co-Executive Director, we decided we needed to redouble our fundraising efforts. We considered writing a script so people can go out to organizations and solicit donations. But something about that seemed too easy. A script doesn't attend to the idiosyncrasies of different organizations, and there is no guarantee it will be delivered with much authenticity.
Instead, we settled on the idea of Community Outreach Groups: two- or three-person teams who foster relationships with other organizations. I am in part influenced by my studies of philanthropy, which suggest that simply asking for money often fails. Donors usually give when they have some form of relationship with the organization.
Simultaneously, Stand Up For Kids could have a more developed social mission. Mostly it focuses on the day-to-day delivery of basic needs. But there is awareness to be raised. People need to see what happens to homeless youth.
By giving awareness-raising presentations we can disseminate important information and foster the sorts of relationships that could result in both monetary and in kind donations.
With that as the operational goal, the next step was to get people willing and able to do it. Or, as a priest I used to work for chants: Identify, Recruit, Educate, Train, and Form.
There are a lot of ways of preparing people for doing community outreach. I could train people one on one. We could have an hour and a half meeting. But I wanted something more. Somewhere along the line, I realized I wanted our usual volunteers as well as homeless or ex-homeless youth to be part of these teams. This was the beginning of the more radical model.
So take the following into consideration:
- I have been running retreats since I was a teen.
- I want to create a highly informed, highly motivated community.
- I've chosen to be homeless in the past.
- And I study altruism in organizing, with a particular interest in how people become radical altruists.
As such, I'm not even sure when I thought of the idea of running a street retreat. I had some money from an innovation grant that had to be spent on leadership development. I had a tangible goal. It seemed to be the thing to do.
There are, of course, pretty solid justifications for such an activity. There is a cultural angle. Just like baseball fans have a culture, and EMTs have a culture, there are often cultural differences between homeless and homed folk. Basically, there are different lessons to learn about getting by. As such, communication between and about homelessness is intercultural. One method of addressing intercultural issues is to create a third culture, a place mutually informed by the interests, values, and realities of both cultures. A participant-planned retreat sounded like a solid way of creating a third culture.
Another way of conceptualizing the retreat is from an oral narrative perspective. While we live in culture with lots of text, I believe that oral traditions serve a powerful role in organizing. There is still magic in the story told by a person standing in front of you. The telling, hearing, learning, and retelling of stories has often had a tranformative affect on those involved. Bringing people together for three days would not only give them a chance to tell their own stories, but such an event would also generate its own stories to be told and retold.
Finally, there is an embodied component to retreats. Retreats are invitations to physically become one of the characters in its narrative arc. The task of going out into the community to speak, network, and ask for money is going to require initiative, commitment, and courage. So I figure that becoming part of a living story, an embodied tale, will help foster those traits and put us on a well aimed trajectory.
To follow the retreat in chronological order, click the button "Newer Post" below the comments section.
