An Easy and Revised Proposal

As GO!, get outdoors, an organization focused on getting people out and active, was a complete flop, I decided to garner my full attention to Habitat for Humanity which is an unbiased organization committed to building houses for families who do not have houses for one reason or another. There are different ways to get involved in this group and fight off the gloomy problem of homelessness. Some examples are to go out and help with the builds/building of houses or to just do whatever your group does to raise money for the group, i.e. car washes and fun runs/races. As the number of homeless is on the rise, this is an organization that I fully believe will help a countless number of people in the end. Habitat for Humanity is well worth any time that I can give to it.

Although my initial intentions for Public Sphere Week was to try and make a video or power point, I realized only after experiencing first hand that when trying to advocate, people walking by generally will not give much time to the advocator. Luckily, I just ended up making some miniature handouts because the attention span of most of the audience that was passing by seemed to be as big as that sheet of paper being handed to them. I find myself lucky to have just getting papers out to people rather than making some extravagant video. Probably fifty percent of the time, I would see the people throw away one of our slips of papers right after getting them. How are people even supposed to help when they do not care enough to look or find out what the problems are?

Homelessness is something that will not be solved over night. It is a sorrowful and tricky problem that is hard to defeat, but with enough effort from willing individuals, can be conquered. Just thinking of the millions of people homeless, in the U.S. alone, should make just about anyone sick. As I continue to assure myself that the flyers that I passed out were not worthless, but not entirely useful either due to low attention spans or low crowds, I began to think that there needs to be a shift of audience, a wider scale. No one that is headed into our University Center wants to join a club at eight o’clock in the morning. To get maximum efficiency of advocacy, the people of Habitat for Humanity need to turn their influence to more local government officials.

Although, I am sure that many people are aware, few people know how serious this is. Sometimes if I have to sleep on a couch I flip out while there are people out in the country without water, food, and a place to sleep. They would probably be happy to sleep on a floor. A nice fix to the problem of people being so unaware would be to make the common populous know how not having a home is. Make them feel what not being able to come to a secure and warm place is like and not know where to sleep that night or not know what to eat. Programs could be installed into all levels of schools to teach children, teens, and adults how we can stop homelessness with donations, help on builds, and by simply spreading the word.

After public sphere week I realize that I want to get the word across a lot of people’s minds about what Habitat for Humanity does. Whether it be fighting poverty and theft through giving people houses or just how easy it can be to get someone in a house, there will be a more common knowledge of the subject. To make the government fully understand what is happening, at the least in our country, with people being laid off of work and not having enough money to get by is just one of my goals. I will do this by writing officials first handed.