For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt called to help people get to a better position in life. I already do what I can, but the ideas I’d like to pursue are on a much larger scale than anything I’ve been able to do thus far. This post will describe the plan I have in mind at this point as best as I can, which I hope will help make it come to pass at some point in the next five years, even if it’s much simpler in the beginning and not the final form I have in mind.
The way I see it, there are two parts of life that everybody should have in order: the physical and the spiritual. If they have the physical but not the spiritual, they’ll feel unfulfilled; if they have the spiritual but not the physical, they’ll feel fulfilled but won’t have long to live. Effectively helping people requires getting both where they should be, and most people will probably require more work to get the spiritual life in order since that seems to be the more neglected one.
Since shelter is one of the basic requirements for survival, the first step will be to establish a large enough shelter to house the people who have nowhere else to go. Having a safe place to sleep each night and avoid bad weather, dangerous people, and toxic situations will provide a great deal of peace to everyone there and help them move forward.
While they live there, they’ll have access to whatever they need to get their lives together: food, showers, security, medical care, counseling/therapy, childcare services, transportation, exercise facilities, spiritual guidance, etc. Once their basic needs are met, the focus will shift from surviving to thriving. Everyone will get a savings account (into which money is deposited monthly) and a checking account for expenses they would eventually have to cover, job training, financial information and assistance, and other useful resources for getting their lives in order. Although there will be an effort to do as many of these things as possible at the shelter, things such as medical procedures and certain kinds of legal help may require transportation to other places; in either case, qualified professionals would be used for all of these tasks in order to get the best possible results.
As everyone gets more stable and their capacity to support themselves increases, outside support will gradually be reduced until it’s no longer needed. For example, there will still be monthly deposits into everyone’s savings accounts even after they get good jobs or start their own businesses, but the deposits would gradually shrink in size. This way they won’t have the rug pulled out from underneath them but they also won’t continue receiving assistance when they’re fully independent.
In addition to putting my own money into this project, I’m thinking of using crowdfunding, private donations, and help from existing organizations to get this going. I have no experience running anything like this, so I’ll take whatever help or suggestions I can get. There’s no rush, though, as it’ll probably be at least a few years before I’ll be able to start this. Also, please feel free to take any of these ideas and use them yourself. The more people working on humanitarian ventures, the better the world will be.