What I got from all this

When I began my research, my initial thought was to write about homeless people. There are some many homeless people around, this couldn’t be hard right?

Why I pick this topic was because back in my hometown, there was a place called Tent City next to the Ontario Airport in southern California. The place was a campground for people who are homeless. I had the pleasure to visit the area and to my surprise, found a community. A group of people took it upon themselves to distribute donations from churches and other non-profit organization. They had food, blankets, and even first aide supplies for the entire campground.

So I thought to myself, surely there is something like this in San Francisco right?

I did a little research, and the closest I’ve found was homeless people sleeping in various parts of Golden Gate Park. The city had no such campsite dedicated to homeless people.

I decided then to focus on people who works with the homeless. There are dozens of non-profit organizations and homeless shelters in the city, I should have no problem getting access to them and get the detail on how each organization are connected in helping people in need.

Once I started to visit these shelters, I began to realize that things are not as easy as I imagine.

Most of the people in administration weren’t too thrill that I was looking into their organization. Many of them seem flat out intimidating. I tried to set up interviews and sent many emails, but most did not respond. Pretty much they were not making any time for me.

When I finally sat down with one person from an organization dedicated to homeless children called Home away From Homelessness, she was nice enough to give me details about how the organization is run. But as soon as the children arrived, I was not allowed to be there to see what the children do there.

Many of the administrators told me that they had to keep the people and children out due to privacy reasons. I can respect that. However, this really got me thinking. If someone like me, who actually went in and try to see how the homeless people relate to the programs around the city, and get nothing; how much does average people know about the homeless and homeless shelters around the city?

I was fortunate to still get some of my questions answered through working with Coalition of Homelessness. But maybe it won’t be such a bad idea to ask this question, just what are these programs that supposedly help homelessness doing?