Day 18 – Melody Nixon

My leads to volunteer with New York City Services (in an overnight shelter), the Coalition for the Homeless (for the dinner van!), and New York City Coalition Against Hunger (in soup kitchens) have somehow met with dead ends. (Despite many phone calls, phone messages, and emails…) Perhaps this is simply a result of the massive scale of all of the city operations; there are so many people to coordinate, and so few resources.  On Friday I will attend an orientation session with New York Cares, which will enable me to sign up for one of their ‘products’ in the Hunger program – but the product I end up with may or may not involve work with homeless people. As this project progresses I realize I need to seek out alternative ways to connect with the people in whom I am interested.

 

Chatting with people on the street is thoroughly rewarding, but I feel I need to carry out a more structured interview to really get to the crucial issues I want to address. Each time I chat to a homeless person sitting on the footpath, I stretch my mind trying to recall all the questions I want to ask. How do you think your identity has changed since you became homeless? What about your self-confidence? How do you think your race has played a role in your homelessness? Do you feel that you have a community on the streets here? What would you most desire first – a home, or a community? Can you have one without the other? Even when I do remember these questions, I find it a challenge to slot them in to casual conversation.

 

There’s also the issue of finding people who are in the right space to reflect on their situation. To this end, the internet is a valuable resource. I have been emailing with some homeless people who blog online, and some who tweet. I’m impressed by the articulate self-reflection and earnestness of many homeless bloggers. One of the people I follow is Mark Horvath, a homeless man turned homed activist from Los Angeles. He is currently on touring Canada documenting cases of homelessness there (presently, he is in Calgary). Horvath advocates working within the dominant sphere of consumer choice to find empowerment. He promotes social networking as a means of connecting homeless people with services. His website http://wearevisible.com/ offers beginner level tutorials on setting up gmail, twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts. He claims that his service has empowered homeless people to tell their own stories. He claims it has also helped them to reunite with family members and find shelter.

 

The twitter live feed on http://wearevisible.com/ is amazing; a constant stream of astounding micro-stories. There’s: @TheHomelessBlog, a man who is living in his car in the U.K. @JayteeStarr is a “homeless youth in NYC” who is “striving to get out of the shelter system and into a good life!” The latest tweet from @homelessgirl1 provides a link to her blog post about how religion made her homeless.

 

But criticisms of Mark Horvath are widespread and scathing. Some (including Brianna Karp in The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness) claim he is a self-serving individualist (just check out the comment below the Calgary Herald article on his current tour of Canada). Others say that promoting fame as a way for homeless people to be lifted out of poverty is highly problematic. The spotlight of the virtual world can be blinding, and its trends fleeting, and it is debatable whether the internet provides a real community for the disenfranchised. But social media certainly does provide a platform for people’s voices. As the blog of @homelessgirl1 attests, telling one’s story can be a powerful act of self-reclamation.

 

I’m just waiting for an opportunity to chat with someone like @homelessgirl1, @homelessdebi, or Dark Forbid – a homeless blogger sleeping rough in the U.K. It will happen one day soon, if I wait – as Dark Forbid says, it’s not always easy to get to the free computer at the homeless center, and it takes time to find a spot with free wifi. In the meantime, I might just show up at the door of the Coalition for the Homeless in the city here, and beg to volunteer. They wouldn’t turn me away, right…?