Is There a Better Way to Solve Homelessness?

Homelessness is problem in most of the larger cities in the United States. I volunteered at a homeless shelter for over a year. The homeless center could provide beds for 50 to 70 homeless women. It also provided clothing and light snacks for homeless people. In my experience, many of the homeless had problems with drugs and/or alcohol, but some of them used the center for a hand up rather than just a handout.

Virginia Allen, in an article published in The Daily Signal, discussed a unique way to address homelessness. She shared the experience of James Whitford and his wife who founded a ministry about 25 years ago to help the poor and homeless people in Missouri. Soon after they started the ministry, Whitford felt prompted to find out what it is like to be homeless. He discussed his feeling with his wife and obtained her support to be “homeless” for an abbreviated period of time. He had nothing but the clothes on his back when he left home. 

Not long after leaving home, he sat on a street corner with a young man named Ralph who was in his 30s. Whitmore had previously ministered to the man, but now they were homeless together. Whitford was hungry, and Ralph offered half his sandwich to him.

“And if you put yourself in that position of a homeless person offering his food to you, how do you respond? I didn’t say it,” Whitford recalled, “but I remember feeling or thinking, well, ‘NO, I’m not going to take your sandwich, Ralph. I’m not going to do that. I can go somewhere if I need to, and you’re the ministry, and I’m the minister.’”

At that moment, Whitford says, he realized he had been “treating Ralph and thousands of other people as objects of my good intentions … rather than subjects who have autonomy, capacity, and agency.” The experience changed Whitford’s perspective on serving the poor, and permanently affected the way he led his ministry, moving from a “handout model to a hand-up model.”

“If we’re not engaging people in reciprocity in our charity, we are failing them horribly, doing them a disservice and not really upholding the inherent human dignity that is in every person,” he said.

Unfortunately, Whitford says many of the government’s programs intended to help the poor, and many charity programs, don’t engage the recipients’ dignity and have instead created significant harm through creating dependence on programs instead of empowerment.

Whitford discovered that his good intentions for helping the poor and needy were not enough to help the struggling people. The welfare program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints operates on the principle that people should not be given handouts but hand ups. Whenever, the Church of Jesus Christ helps able-bodied people, they expect those same people to do something to help the Church membership. Whatever the assigned task may be, it is within the ability of the person being helped. By working for the help that they receive, the person is able to keep their self-esteem and dignity. They may also be developing necessary skills for learning to provide for themselves.