I'm familiar with some similar situations here in California. Families where codependency somehow pulls everyone together despite struggling under the yoke of alcoholism, mental illness, early pregnancies, physical and sexual abuse by various in-laws and other distant relatives, etc. You can pull the children away from the parents, but all of the teaching remains and the children go on to slide into the same situations. Those who get out of the cycle (which actually happens more often than I expected) seem to need every resource that their communities provide, just to stay afloat.
The author of the article seems upset at the city government for their finger-wagging approach toward forcing the homeless along some path to success, and I would just add that when winter comes around and people still aren't moving up your ramp to success, it's time to err on the side of charity.
It's probably worth noting that the New York Times has, since 1912, run a fund called The Neediest Cases, which raises money for social welfare agencies throughout New York City. Though it seems like this particular article isn't part of the series, the paper runs pieces daily that tell similar stories of those in need throughout the months of November, December, and January.
It would be presumptuous to lay the direction of NYC over this era at the feet of anyone else. I think he's had a tremendous impact on the city. Some of it has been really nice for a part of the population, but the neglect is starting to burst through the seams of his tidy-departing gifts to de Blasio.
New York subsidizes housing for the poor. A histogram of income in Manhattan is a bathtub curve, with a bunch of poor people that are being encouraged to live there, essentially none in the middle, and then a whole lot of people above 100K.
That Dasani is demonstrating so much vivacity is impressive to us and so worthy of note that we have an article about her. But we expect the opposite, because all of her environmental cues are encouraging the opposite.
how does it make any sense to blame her parents who are the products of the exact same structure she is now struggling against?
It makes sense to lay (some of the) blame at the feet of her parents because they had a choice. Everybody has a choice. Mom didn't have to smoke crack. Dad didn't have to deal drugs. Did they have the same opportunities as rich white kids from the Upper West Side? No. Does that mean that the choices to smoke crack, deal drugs, and have eight kids is something we should just ignore? Certainly not.
It is true, however in a system like this there have to be failures. Only a small portion of the kids demonstrate enough intuitive capacity for learning, like Dasani, that the meager resources available are utilized for them. Therefore the percentage of the population who fails is by necessity larger. So her parents are of course autonomous human beings, but they lived in a structure that was incapable of not producing them.
You can minimize failure if the point of a system is not output but process. If you continually improve each individual process rather than just optimize for output. So for example in this case if we asked her parents not to produce a good child but simply to figure out how she can get to bed on time every night, then we are asking them to do an easily focused on thing. Do not tell them what to do, just say, "how can you do [x]?" maybe providing access to internet research capacities would be helpful for the parent, but in general simply getting them to focus on how to improve their immediate surroundings in that moment itself produces meaningful change.
you can repeat this method of assigning tasks until eventually the individual, old or young, rich or poor, begins to focus on their own on How things work rather than What they are.
>You can minimize failure if the point of a system is not output but process.
If the point of a system is process then you have the classic "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the bureaucracy" situation. At some point you need to look at output.
It's somewhat dishonest to put much, if any blame on Dasani's parents. They were raised without the decision making skills and opportunities necessary to evaluate the long-term consequences of their decisions. This behavior will very likely be passed down to their children.
Each of those children, knowing only their own lives, may grow up to have n-more children that they can't afford. Is it suddenly their fault, or is there a bigger, vicious cycle of poverty at play here?
The blame lies with the society that refuses to help impoverished children break the vicious cycle. Most of the people who deride the need for these kinds of services have never even exchanged words with somebody that poor, let alone been in that situation themselves. They have no idea.
China use forcible sterilization programs, which is one of those ugly and socially unacceptable answers, for good reason. (The US had a similar program. To give you some idea of how well it worked, the case that decided the constitutionality, Buck vs Bell, involved a woman who was considered mentally feeble due to being black, poor, and getting pregnant at 17. Turns out the last one was most likely due to her being raped by a member of her more respectable foster family, who committed her to an institution to cover it up. The whole thing was deeply fucked from the very outset.)
Forcible sterilization is not a substantial factor in enforcing the policy in China - it's enforced through fines and exclusion from all kinds of benefits.
They didn't ask for a unemployed crack addict mother and an unemployed convict father, and yet the state seems to have given them back to both the unemployed crack addict mother and unemployed convict father. They were living in different, perhaps better, circumstance before they were returned to their biological parents. Why not leave them in those circumstances and instead allow visitation of the parents until they can quash their demons and secure a job instead of holding up the "family must be together" mantra and having them live in this hellhole?
Fosters home are often incredibly bad. I have been told by foster parents to keep your kids out of that system at all costs. (Those foster parents obviously cared about their children, but they've also seen children come through who were previously taken in by someone else just for the paycheck.)
What about things like freely available contraception and decent sex education at school age? I often read that there is occasionally opposition to both in the US.
The children are the victims. I'm certainly not blaming them for the circumstances they were born into. I am certainly blaming the state for forcing the family back together to satisfy the "families must live together" crowd when mom and dad don't have their shit together, and I am certainly blaming the mom and dad for having eight kids when they can't even support one.
If you bother to actually ask the child here she will tell you she'd rather stay with her parents and family then have better material circumstances with others.
And a crack addict wants to do crack. Sometimes people don't know what is best for them. That's why we let courts decide custody instead of the child.
That said, in spite of my (probably uninformed) opinion, the courts in New York think that this family is better together in this shelter, so what do I know anyway?
Actually, this is exactly why those who mire in poverty have more children. The logic is that more children = safety net in the future. This is usually prevalent in societies and countries without strong institutions. Hmm...
Yes your experience is limited. Birth rates rise when children are an income producing asset. The shift from rural to urban populations dramatically lowers the birthrate since normally children are only an expense in a urban environment. However in societies that pay out money per child there is an incentive to have more children and the birth rates for the poorest tend to rise. This phenomena has been documented around the world and has nothing to do with your views on religion.
My views on religion? Um? Both my parents grew up in families with 9+ children because all of my grandparents thought birth control was a sin. That's my experiences. That's in an urban setting. All their large family neighbors did it for religious reasons too. I don't personally know a single large family that isn't doing it for religious purposes. There are also some large families who are doing it for religion in the media such as The Duggars as well as some public movements for large families such as Quiverfull.
When you're thinking clearly that's easy to see. But when you're living a hard life, my observation is that people generally take what solace they can in more basic elements of their humanity and don't think much about the future, if they're capable of thinking about it at all. 'Auburn is a pit stop,' according to her mother. That seems a silly belief, but if you take that as the context in which her choices are made you notice they become more reasonable?
Your options for dealing with the consequences of those choices are limited by both the lack of preferable alternatives and the need to act with humanity in enforcing them. If you throw the kids into the care system, it's not clear they're going to do any better.
As for stopping people making those choices in the first place, I don't think people who view it as not the parent's fault really disagree with you there. But how?
Making a good choice with respect to employment and the law and so on, and sticking to it, requires that you be a certain kind of person. You need the ability to draw motivation from distant goals, the abstract knowledge to see the path to the goal in the first place, it requires - to a certain extent - that others around you share those qualities, it requires self-control to deny yourself short-term rewards.
And if you don't have those things, you can't make those choices - at least not to start off with. The choices we make are made within the context of our lives, and our beliefs about those lives and where they can be going. What sort of choices would you make if you had their capabilities and their beliefs?
You have to make smaller choices, that make you more the kind of person for who those choices would make sense and be practically achievable. And you have to see those smaller choices making you happier, having a positive effect on your life - to try and develop some sort of self-confidence and motivation.
That latter part is a very complex problem that impacts areas of life beyond just homelessness. It's no particular surprise that unemployment, teen pregnancy, low educational outcomes and so on tend to group together. They're all influenced, to lesser and greater extents, of to be somewhat pithy for a moment, 'Not having your shit together.'
Well get your shit together then.
Yeah, okay, how do we create an environment where that's gonna happen? Given that choices determine the sort of person you'll become and that determines your later choices, early intervention seems likely to be a part of it - perhaps through improving education to the poor. Maybe breaking up communities of homeless people and rehousing them into richer communities so they have better chances of falling within catchment areas of good schools - and aren't subject to a culture of generational poverty.
I don't know, those are just a couple of things. But, however it's done the basic act of assigning blame seems largely immaterial. The world is what it is, people make the choices they make. What matters is that people are suffering - and what's important is what can be done about it within the bounds of compassion and practicality.
There are two things that make eating out the most viable option for a whole meal when you're poor:
The first is that when you have a refrigerator that's sub-par and don't have a freezer, you have to buy the smallest quantities of anything perishable; that means it's expensive as hell. There are things like rice that you can buy in bulk, but if you're in a place with bugs and rodents (like they are), you're screwed on that too, generally.
The second is that if you're in a homeless shelter, you can't cook. At most, you can make a sandwich, but that goes back to point #1.
Eating out isn't a convenience for them; it's survival.
The argument to this is that Chinese takeout tastes good (loaded with sugar and grease) and it's fast and readily available when the family comes in to $20. They live in a food desert and the mom never learned to cook. You can't blame the family in the article for falling for instant gratification or 'treating themselves' which is also the excuse for a lot of the other behavior in the article.
The mom is drinking a beer on the bus, isn't she? I'm guessing that because it's in a brown paper bag.
I'm curious: if you found another engineer who was in a messy codebase doing something something seemingly crazy, would you 1) assume they're an idiot or 2) reserve judgment until you know more?
I would hope 2). Because here's the thing: we can't extricate ourselves from our history, and the people closest to the problem have a lot more information about it than those moralizing from afar. There's a bunch of questions you don't bother to ask yourself:
Was the container of Chinese food actually purchased or found? Who knows. Probably, but the parents don't seem to make a habit of it: the daughter makes her siblings PB&Js. And is it a crazy expense? Also who knows, but buying a couple containers of cooked white rice in NYC isn't going to be crazy expensive.
Are there nearby grocery stores to buy actual food? Maybe, but more likely the nearest places will be liquor stores selling shitty food for outrageous prices.
Does the facility they're in provide the means to cook raw ingredients? Probably not.
Is the electricity supplied consistent enough to trust having more than a single meal in the fridge? Who knows.
And perhaps the biggest thing: do the parents have the capability to plan to cook and to succeed in that endeavor? You might say that "these people deserve to suffer if they can't manage to cook rice and beans," but here's the thing: maybe they can't. Maybe they never picked up that skill, maybe drugs have destroyed their capabilities for planning more than a minute ahead. But regardless, they can't.
In tech, we recognize that we have to build systems out of potentially faulty components. But when we're building a society, there's a strain of thought saying that you shouldn't design for fault, because if a component is faulty, it deserves to be dumped into a garbage bin.
"I'm curious: if you found another engineer who was in a messy codebase doing something something seemingly crazy, would you 1) assume they're an idiot or 2) reserve judgment until you know more?"
I might say:
"Having a messy codebase is a way to keep having bugs."
My original statement is quite helpful, if you're trying to get yourself out of a financial hole. Restaurant eating is savagely expensive. I learned that the first time I had to loop a paycheck. It's not complete advice, meaning that not eating at restaurants alone won't lift you from poverty, but getting into the restaurant habit is a good way to stay broke.
I am not sure you understand just how poor they are.
"In a good month, their combined efforts can bring in a few hundred dollars."
They are in a situation where they cannot afford to save money in most conventional ways.
Spending $100 on a fridge that they can't properly use (because they can't cook in a shelter) isn't a wise appropriation of a significant portion of their monthly income.
You can carry a flatscreen TV on the bus or subway. I see that all the time. I haven't seen anyone carry a $100 refridgerator (except the tiny ones) anywhere.
A friend of mine recently, moved into social housing. I donated some of my furniture to him for free. I also paid 50 euros for a moving van and 20 to have some guys help me.
Are you implying that some readers of Hacker News might not know much about the particular problems that homeless individuals are trying to solve, and their simplistic prescriptions that don't take into account actual lived circumstances might not be a cure-all for everyone on the planet?
Also, article stated that the shelter guests are not allowed to bring in canned goods.
In order to have food stored, it basically has to be packaged in plastic or glass. Peanut butter. Jelly. Bread.
A jar of peanut butter is the perfect food for someone without fridge or pantry. It can be stored at room temperature, it is calorie-dense, it is cheap, and it actually has some nutritional value.
If I am ever forced to live at poverty income without basic residential infrastructure, I would definitely walk to the nearest actual grocery store and carry back peanut butter. You can also keep eggs around a while, even in the US, if you can replace the cuticle (removed during processing) with wax. I'd probably cook them in their shells with an electric kettle, dip them in paraffin from plumbers' candles, and put them back into the container.
That's not a terrible idea at all. Around here, you can also get bean filling in jars, which is another good source of protein (and flatulence, but what isn't these days).
Even without a fridge, you can replace lots of take-out meals with things prepared at home, just with a container that seals to keep out bugs. A loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. Bananas. Eggs. Canned tuna.
If you have some method of heating, you can add pasta and rice and beans and oats and sweet potatoes and lentils.
If people are really lacking these tools, I'd be happy to write a check to a New York charity that provides them.
Yeah, I goofed by listing them in the heatless category. You can short-term store them without a fridge, though.
Obviously none of the things I listed will form a complete diet, but if you are eating mostly take-out they are probably a superior substitute for some fraction of those take-out meals.
What's the solution to the security problem? Why would you buy a mini fridge or a hotplate if some crackhead (maybe even your mom or her boyfriend) was just going to take it and pawn it. They already have enough issues just showering safely.
No, this isn't a technical problem. It's bigger than that.
Clicking into a nearly 30,000 word article describing a very complex issue and boiling it down to a vapid attempt at a witty one-liner is a great way to stay ignorant.
Reading Daeken's comment would be a good start toward turing that around.
How do we really know anything about this case? It is heart-wrenching no doubt, and I am sympathetic. But it's a piece of literature (albeit non-fiction), but it's not journalism. Facts are cast in a particular light to make the author's point. Statistics are provided without context; everything is provided without context, except where the author pulls back the curtain and lets us see what he or she wants us to see.
It's an effective piece -- it's able to wring fresh emotion from people who've been hearing similar stories for decades and have become desensitized. But it's not a policy discussion, and it's not even a good starting point for a policy decision.
And the flat screen TV? It seems to me that this family has many issues, one of them being how to prioritize. One would think that someone struggling at that level would sell the TV, and get books from the library for entertainment. How many of the kids have phones? I know of several upper-middle-class families where the kids have to earn their own money to buy get a cell.
The simple answer would be that a greater supply of homes means more people can afford homes in the long run (assuming relatively low population growth). But that is hugely dependent on which states/cities/neighborhoods you're talking about. The section of the world that this article is discussing apparently never gentrified like some of the neighborhoods surrounding it. Things tend to be different in highly urbanized cities like NYC vs. relatively open areas like the Inland Empire.
This article is really sad and quick to blame NYC's outgoing mayor for all of the problems, but suggests absolutely no solutions. The only actionable piece of data in it is that 50% of the city is below the poverty line, which suggests that anyone that doesn't need to be in NYC should never go there. Numbers like that foretell an uprising against those that are not poor, either by the citizens themselves through violence, or by the city government through punitive laws and taxes.
I now feel very sorry for Dasani, and am more sure than ever that I won't be spending time in New York. If that was the point of the article, then well done.
oh I am sure the NYT will devote endless pages the next couple of years to blaming all the woes of NYC on him, use it as an excuse for why the new guy can't fit it all fast, and so and so on.
The question most New Yorker's should be asking is, how do the people who run this facility (Audburn) have jobs? How do the people the report to allow it to happen and if they do, they why are they employed? Having been around some big city "care" its really simply, the bigger the government the less it has to care and the more people that slip through the cracks. Too many programs competing for the same dollars, too many programs with their own rules they barely serve anyone, too many programs for those who need help they have to spend an inordinate amount of time applying to each.
I am quite sure the living conditions don't help the outlook of her parents and in part keeps them down looking for releases. Yet for all the billions spent to take care of the poor it makes you wonder, where is it all going?
If you've ever tried to use or know anything about government grants you'll find out that 50% of your time and grant money will be spent making sure you are complying with spending grant money.
Usually there will be some outrage over a small sum of money being used inappropriately. Benzes for welfare queens for example. The politicians will do something about it by putting in more checks. A few scammers will work the system. More checks are put in place. Ad infinitum. A few years later 50-80% of the budget to help the poor has gone into making sure they use the aid for what we deem appropriate.
New York City has been that way for pretty much all of its modern history. My father, who was born and raised in the Bronx, told me once that NYC is a great place to be rich, and a great place to be poor, with not much room for anyone in between.
This is part of why the arts scene there is so vibrant: "starving artists" have always been able to get by in New York in a way that they couldn't elsewhere.
(Though even they've gotten squeezed in modern times: Roger Ebert quoted John Malkovich saying back in 1989 that "to have starving actors, you have to have a place for them to starve. New York is too expensive for that. You can't afford to starve there anymore." http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/slaves-of-new-york-1989)
Putting living there aside and just looking at visiting, though: if you never visit NYC, you're missing out on one of the great urban experiences the world has to offer. If you're at all interested in the things cities have to offer, it should be a bucket-list destination.
>>My father, who was born and raised in the Bronx, told me once that NYC is a great place to be rich, and a great place to be poor, with not much room for anyone in between.
I don't know about "great place to be poor," but yes, it's a great place to be if you're rich. I have a friend who used to live there, and he said that based literally on your income alone you will get invited to parties and be able to make friends with other rich people. The place is basically the epitome of rich people wanting to associate only with other rich people.
While the statement makes some assumptions, I do think that NYC provides many more services and fallbacks for the very poor that you don't find, say, in Appalachia.
The linked article presents a quite bleak existence, but many of the problems it brings to light are that the services the city provides are of low quality, whereas there are so many places where those types of services don't exist at all. Rural poverty in America can be, from what I understand, far more persistent than most urban poverty.
Liberals like to hate on Bloomberg because they don't feel he has been effective at helping the poor in the city. What they fail to see is that he's done something more important: keeping the rich from leaving, so they stay there and be taxed to provide the money that bankrolls NYC's safety net. The alternative is to become Detroit, where the rich people have left and there is no more money to pay for social services.
The fact is that NYC will always have a ton of poor people. It's almost guaranteed by virtue of its providing subsidized housing, etc, that all the poor from the surrounding areas will migrate to NYC.
Objectively speak Bloomberg was pretty decent for the poor, the outer boroughs, the artists, and many other groups that he's accused of screwing over. The reason for all the vitriol is that he wasn't suitably enthusiastic -- he didn't pay all the required lip service, he isn't perceived to feel people's pain.
Just to take one small example, De Blasio talks about the two New Yorks, but meanwhile he took a lot of money from the large taxi medallion owning companies, and is threatening to close down the new apple green outer boroughs taxis. That's a program that unequivocally targets the "other NY".
"The reason for all the vitriol is that he wasn't suitably enthusiastic -- he didn't pay all the required lip service, he isn't perceived to feel people's pain."
I agree. He's a strong leader who didn't start doing everything "for the poor" and instead focused on making the city strong and beating back the criminal element that ruined it.
That's never popular with the self-pity/white knighting crowd (who seem to have discovered HN, alas).
If all the poverty statistics in this article are accurate, in about 10 years we can expect to see a reversal of the decline in US violent crime that's been happening since the 90s.
What can be done- what is the right mix of social policy and tough love? Clearly homeless drug users shouldn't have 8 kids- but how can this be prevented? Should we take away children from all homeless or drug addict parents as soon as they're born? How do other civilized countries handle this situation?
It makes me sick that I pay around 40% in state and federal taxes and social security (not that much lower than Western European countries) yet there is still so much poverty and poverty related issues in our country.
And I think the solution is raise the minimum wage and set a long term plan for a sort of guaranteed minimum income / negative income tax. Throwing money at the problem is literally the best way to solve it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-to-c...
Minor nitpick, the parent said they pay 40% in state and federal taxes and social security and you quoted only federal taxes (looks like the last graph includes Social Security)
I still don't know how much the parent pays in taxes, but that didn't include state tax, either income, property, or sales tax.
I'm obviously estimating, but when I look at which is more likely, someone misunderstanding tax brackets, or someone paying an insane amount of property tax in a state that doesn't exist, the first choice seems more likely.
I didn't say or even imply any did. I said "minor nitpick."
I said "I still don't know how much the parent pays in taxes."
The GP might be counting all their payroll deductions as kinda a "tax" depending on how you look at it. It doesn't matter, I just pointed out you didn't include state taxes.
True, but if you count student loan repayments and health insurance payments (something that most civilized countries provide for free or low cost)- those are almost a tax and quickly get you over 40%.
Looking at my 2012 tax return: my taxable income last year was $x and the sum of my federal and state taxes (including all FICA, or in my case, "self-employment tax") was $0.39x. Including local taxes and fees it would definitely be 40%+.
That's a bit of a cheat, though, since "taxable income" is the number you get after accounting for all the politically contrived deductions and exemptions. As a percentage of my total income it's more like 25%, and if I also don't include FICA (since that's just the government holding onto my money for me until I'm old, right?) it goes all the way down to 12%.
That said, 25% is the reality, although it does feel like 40% sometimes.
> Throwing money at the problem is literally the best way to solve it:
You clearly didn't read the whole article. This particular family inherited $40k but spent it on heroin. The naivety of that Atlantic article is astounding.
I think New York City has done an absolute ton for this family. This girl might have done okay, except her mother encourages her to fight her peers (and the mom picks fights with store clerks in front of her children). That is ultimately going to be her downfall, and I am not sure what the city is supposed to do.
Most of that 40% isn't going to pay for stuff like this. You should really have a new sentence starting after the word taxes. It makes it sound like you're implying that the money is all going toward paying for social services, when it isn't.
I realize that it isn't- what bothers me is that it is high, nearly as high as European countries, yet we have exponentially more poverty and poverty related problems.
>> It makes me sick that I pay around 40% in state and federal taxes and social security (not that much lower than Western European countries) yet there is still so much poverty and poverty related issues in our country.
Dasani's story is sad and it happens far too often. For whatever reason there are plenty of people (like the parents in this article) who will fuck up every chance that you give them.
Being from a crime-ridden, poor city I have to see this every day.
It makes me sick that I pay around 40% in state and federal taxes and social security (not that much lower than Western European countries) yet there is still so much poverty and poverty related issues in our country.
I wonder how much of this has to do with scale. Americans often look to European countries as models of what governments should do, but I think we often forget that most of those countries have smaller populations than New York City[0]. And, if I can vaguely trust what I'm reading, many of the larger countries have poverty issues that are not unlike those of the U.S.
So, your 40% tax rate is used to combat the issues of ~313 million people across wildly different situations. I'm sure that if NYC could collect a 40% tax rate and implemented programs focused on its own issues, the government could do a lot more to combat poverty. But, NYC only gets a piece of the pie, and the federal government needs to figure out how to help the homeless in NYC as well as the homeless in Washington, DC, and Chicago, IL, and.....
Given that, I tend to think there is not a technocratic solution to poverty in the U.S.--that is, it isn't just that we haven't quite found the proper program, or implemented it properly. Homelessness and poverty have been around for a long time, and while during some periods, some governments may have done alright in dealing with it, no one is ever going to turn a knob and make poverty magically disappear. That's not say we shouldn't try, but we also need plenty of organizations that simply get out there and provide basic help for the homeless (food, shelter, etc).
> I'm sure that if NYC could collect a 40% tax rate and implemented programs focused on its own issues
NYC has an income tax on top of state and federal income taxes. It's based on NYS taxable income. For example, at $65,000/yr you'll pay $2,047 + 3.648% of 5,000, for a total of $2,229.4[0].
To be far only 29.2% of those taxes are used to combat the issues of ~313 million people across wildly different situations. The other 10.8% goes towards military spending to combat 6.816 billion people across wildly different situations.
"tough love" is a very patronising concept. the poor don't need to be "pushed to be self-reliant" (which, if you read the article, is far more a part of the problem than of the solution); they need the people maintaining the current system to stop screwing them over at every turn.
a good start would be to find ways of eliminating "poor taxes" (i.e. the myriad ways in which poor people end up paying more than rich people for the same goods and services), and to replace intrusive criterion-based aid programs with simply giving the poor money (something that studies have proven to be more effective), possibly by way of a negative tax bracket.
"It makes me sick that I pay around 40% in state and federal taxes and social security (not that much lower than Western European countries) yet there is still so much poverty and poverty related issues in our country."
Maybe the problem isn't the money involved, but the methods involved. After all, they say that to repeat the same actions and expect different results is a form of pathology.
Find a local organization that helps the homeless, and offer yourself as free IT help for a full day (or three).
You may not be an IT guy, but you are computer savvy. You'll be invaluable for jobs like:
- cleaning crapware off computers
- removing spyware/viruses and installing antivirus
- fixing email issues
- networking printers
- answering questions about Excel, Word, and so forth
By helping this way, you'll improve the productivity of the organization drastically, which will have a real impact you can feel good about. Best off, your contribution will act as a multiplier, lasting well beyond the initial time you'll put in.
--
If you're more able to giving money than time, please visit and consider donating to http://greensborohousingcoalition.com - this is a non-profit in Greensboro, NC, which does amazing work both in preventing homelessness and making sure that safe housing is available for low-income families.
My stepmother is the director of this organization, and I can speak to her and the GHC staff's incredible hard work and dedication. They manage to run at only a 15% overhead, which is truly incredible. Your money will have an impact here.
It seems like it'd be even better to have a central agency that multiple non-profits could turn to for this stuff, rather than each one needing their own IT guy (of varying skill) to do it for them individually. A Helper's Help Desk.
That would be very useful, but the point I'm making is that any help at all would go tremendously far.
I think we have a tendency to want to use our Special Talents to help people, when that's not always the most effective thing to do. For example, I prefer building websites for non-profits any day of the week to running anti-virus, but that's often not nearly as helpful as just upgrading everyone's copy of Internet Explorer and removing all the toolbars (speaking from first hand experience here; I've done both). Also, if you only have a day or two to offer, you need to be realistic about what you can finish. No one benefits from work half-done, and everything needs maintenance.
So instead of waiting for the perfect storm of Your Skills meets The Perfect Charity, just go down to the office of a charity you care about and offer to help with IT stuff. Its not glamorous, and you might not self-identify as an IT person, but you'll be more able to help than you might realize.
While this has good sentiment, I feel like a lot of nonprofits and charities would rather you volunteer your physical support rather than get rid of malware, which nowadays a lot of people are capable of doing, and they might be apprehensive to let you go and change stuff in their computers if they have it laid out in some idiosyncratic way. But I think the best option would be to ask the nonprofit themselves, what the best way you could be helping is.
I have done this, and it is very helpful. Give it a try before you dismiss it!
You seriously won't believe what you'll find. For example, new laptops purchased from a big box have so much crap starting up that they make the laptop run poorly. It might seem obvious to you what programs should be uninstalled and easy for you to do it, but that's not true for other people.
Just email them and say you'd like to setup a chair in their office X day(s), all day, and anyone with any computer problems should come see you and you'll do your best to help, no job too small. I think you'll find your offer well received and useful, but there's certainly no harm in testing it out.
As a computer person, you're in a unique position to help and you can have a big impact. Don't dismiss this idea so easily!
I'm not dismissing it, I'm just saying I think the best thing would be to ask on a case per case basis, "what do you need most help with?" I see this as a sort of systemic problem with nonprofits and other causes nowadays -- sometimes the most obvious step (asking what they need) is neglected.
Volunteering as an IT support guy is still terrible ROI for most people here.
Volunteer work in general is mostly about spending some of your time to get a good feeling for yourself, and advertising the charities in question. Basically everyone who haves a profession of any kind gets the best ROI in charity for their time by working, and donating the money earned doing so. This is abstract and feels less like helping people, but if your purpose really is to help and not purchasing happiness for yourself, it's what you should do.
And they take my money to ... pay someone for IT support?
Homelessness is a complex problem but if you want to help that child, the second best bet is to help her parents. Help with whatever problems they have, help with overcoming racial bias, mental illness, drug addiction, poor cv, whatever.
The first best bet is of course to pay for her scholarship to a boarding school. which rather stuffs her baby sister. Complicated.
If this kind of 'mundane' computer tasks is really an issue for helping organizations then I'm gonna give a try, I've always been afraid of too had problems.
Money. In comparison to volunteering you get very little out of it, but that makes it all the more charitable.
I assume you are some kind of fairly well paid professional -- work an extra three hours a week and donate the extra money to e.g. a food pantry. You will do them a lot more good than spending those same three hours doing unskilled labor for them.
This is good advice, but there is still the question of where to donate the money. Charities don't respond to market pressure the same way a firm selling goods or services does, so lots of charities exist that do middling or even negative value for their donated dollars.
Has GiveWell done evaluations of programs to end homelessness?
Or ideally, both. Homelessness is such a fundamentally and universally misunderstood and stigmatized issue that it behooves everyone to educate themselves via first-hand contact.
The volunteering doesn't benefit the organization so much as it benefits oneself, and by extension society at large by removing one more potential spigot of hateful nonsense.
I'm surprised there isn't more innovation in the media regarding reporting on complex issues.
To truly describe complex issues, readers need the ability to both get a high-level view of the story and drill down to details and smaller narratives at times. Along those lines, I'm not sure why primary source material (raw transcripts of interviews, unpublished photos, links to source material) aren't included in even short reports by default.
In my mind, complex stories should be reported in a format similar to a small, mostly self-contained wiki where more details are linked or hidden by default.
The lack of innovation here surprises me because the news media is starving for reasons for people to consume their content. Involved, wiki-style reporting would be very hard to rip off.
"Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline"
Does anyone know of other places in the US that has taken this approach to poverty and what the results are? I am genuinely interested in understanding how "empowering the poor" works in the US. I know there are several reported successes with micro-lending to the poor in other countries, but I wonder if such go-getter mentality exists in the American society.
The founder of the company where I work started a "Turkey Trot" five years go to benefit a local food bank.
He took the time to set up a very simple website to register "runners" for the event ($25 is asked per person, but not everyone pays, obviously), and got the permission from the city to have a few police officers make sure participants weren't run over. Truth is, it is more of a community event almost like a parade, where some people wear turkey hats, dress up their dogs in costumes, and everyone has a little fun Thankgiving morning before everyone overeats later in the day. But if you want to run 5k you can. Most walk.
In any event, that first year a few hundred people attended. This year, it's estimated that over three thousand people participated. You can do the math for the ticket sales. Several of us volunteer our time to support this annual event now (I do the postcards & posters). This year we even received generous corporate sponsorships to further reduce overhead costs.
It's only once a year, so it isn't a huge time drain. But the impact is incredible and does help a lot of people in need. If almost every neighborhood could do this...
A lot of charities have serious problems building and maintaining websites, and will be very grateful for any help you can offer. I would recommend reaching out to them directly about this, since they often don't even know who to ask.
In my experience with a few charities whose websites I've been brought in to rescue, they're often left in disarray after they hired a well meaning but inexperienced developer who they were introduced to through personal connections. This works well initially, but becomes costly to maintain - both in terms of financial cost and managerial time spent overseeing the project.
If you can commit to either a monthly check-in to keep the website fresh, or to helping them build a more sustainable workflow so that they can easily update their own content, that could have a huge ROI for them in terms of fundraising, finding volunteers, and, perhaps most importantly, reaching the people who need their help.
As it relates to homelessness, many homeless people have access to the internet via a mobile device or library. For these people, an intuitive website can be the best way to connect with charities and receive their aid. Many charities still don't have responsive sites, so they're essentially cut off from reaching the mobile population. I think the ROI on that alone would be a great place to start.
The pictures are interesting: they have stuff. What they lack is infrastructure and maintenance. Major items: deteriorating walls, decaying mattresses, a sink in the middle of a room, where's the bathtub? Where's anything near that sink?
What matters to me in Dasani's story, and what should matter to many of us, is how difficult it is for children with real talent and ambition to escape their circumstances. Think about the temptations that must be in front of her - sure, her mind and her strength and her beauty could eventually lift her out of poverty, but they could also make her a phenomenally successful drug dealer or thief. Or frustration could drive her to wasting her mind with drugs, or committing small stupid crimes that put her in the revolving door of prisons.
I grew up poor, although not as poor as her. I know how frustrating and difficult it is for talented, ambitious children. I got lucky, but there were so many ways it could have gone wrong, and nearly did.
But here's what worries me, and should worry lots of people. Call it arrogance, but I firmly believe real progress in our society is made by those top few percent with both the talent and ambition to do something new, something dangerous and important. Most people either can't or won't. So when society wastes one of them in the ghetto, it hurts all of us.
Givewell (http://www.givewell.org/) is focused on providing the best ROI. It doesn't necessarily fulfill the emotional aspect of personally volunteering and interacting with whom you are helping, but if your main concern is actually helping people, it's your best shot.
Poverty is incredibly sad, and I understand the desire to want to take some direct action to fight it. And of course, if you want to volunteer your time, you certainly can and I'm sure people will be grateful.
However, for those with in demand, high value skills like people HN, I suggest you focus your time on using those skills effectively. You can do more good by just earning more income and donating money to good charities than donating your time.
To illustrate this point, consider this extreme case -- what if a young Steve Jobs had poured extra energy into serving soup at a local church to the homeless and had not gotten Apple off the ground? Yes, he would directly help hungry people. However, he has created so much wealth by forming Apple that not only does he have far more money that he could give away, but he's also created an entire company of employees with more wealth that they could also choose to give to charity.
Especially when it came to his illegitimate children. As much as I dislike Microsoft, Gates has done a billion times more for the poverty-stricken than Jobs ever did. Please do not hold Jobs up as some epitome of philanthropy. He was absolutely not, at least publicly.
You could make a list of spare rooms among your freinds, or club together with freinds to rent some space, then give that for free or at negligible rent to people who need it.
If you do this you could also work with one of the homeless charities and explain what you are doing so that they can help provide support. Helping at a soup kitchen is admirable, however that doesn't solve the problem of needing somewhere secure, safe and stable to live.
There's an interesting organization called Year Up[1] - I have volunteered there and it was a great experience. I think a lot of people on HN could have a significant impact on students there.
We Europeans have our own troubles with homelessness and beggars (currently esp. German cities with Romanian and Bulgarian beggars), but well, we at least crack down on insecure housing.
Something like the mentioned shelter in the article would not survive a single day under inspection. If a landlord would rent (or let people live in) such a house, he would immediately 1) have all people taken out by government and 2) find himself in jail or with hefty fines. I wonder why NYC let this shelter open despite dozens upon dozens of complaints!
Why are there so many Romanians and Bulgarians in Germany? Seems a weird choice to make. I mean, Germany's a lovely place, but why a mass exodus to there? "It's Tuesday, let's move to Germany."
We're the first rich country when they move to the east (from a Romania/Bulgaria POV) - and Germany is the last of Europe to have a reputation for being financially stable, providing social/healthcare coverage and not being overly racist.
France/Great Britain, in contrast, are not very favorable target countries: France has a strong nationalist/right-wing extremist political movement (Le Pen's Front National), and Great Britain, while rich, is not covered by Schengen agreement and excepted from a lot of EU regulations - so it's both difficult to get into, and stay in.
It's a good question why the government agencies responsible are allowed to ignore regulations and laws governing their conduct. In this case the shelter is actually operated by the city.
160 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadThe author of the article seems upset at the city government for their finger-wagging approach toward forcing the homeless along some path to success, and I would just add that when winter comes around and people still aren't moving up your ramp to success, it's time to err on the side of charity.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/newyorkandregion/neediest...
Okay, not to victim blame, but eight children when her parents can't even support themselves?
how does it make any sense to blame her parents who are the products of the exact same structure she is now struggling against?
If the point of a system is process then you have the classic "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the bureaucracy" situation. At some point you need to look at output.
Each of those children, knowing only their own lives, may grow up to have n-more children that they can't afford. Is it suddenly their fault, or is there a bigger, vicious cycle of poverty at play here?
The blame lies with the society that refuses to help impoverished children break the vicious cycle. Most of the people who deride the need for these kinds of services have never even exchanged words with somebody that poor, let alone been in that situation themselves. They have no idea.
Open that door and you get a whole world of ugly answers and precious few good and/or socially acceptable answers.
edit: s/Chile/Child
If you bother to actually ask the child here she will tell you she'd rather stay with her parents and family then have better material circumstances with others.
That said, in spite of my (probably uninformed) opinion, the courts in New York think that this family is better together in this shelter, so what do I know anyway?
It's really more that economics doesn't properly serve as a predictor of human behavior (news at 11! ;-))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
Your options for dealing with the consequences of those choices are limited by both the lack of preferable alternatives and the need to act with humanity in enforcing them. If you throw the kids into the care system, it's not clear they're going to do any better.
As for stopping people making those choices in the first place, I don't think people who view it as not the parent's fault really disagree with you there. But how?
Making a good choice with respect to employment and the law and so on, and sticking to it, requires that you be a certain kind of person. You need the ability to draw motivation from distant goals, the abstract knowledge to see the path to the goal in the first place, it requires - to a certain extent - that others around you share those qualities, it requires self-control to deny yourself short-term rewards.
And if you don't have those things, you can't make those choices - at least not to start off with. The choices we make are made within the context of our lives, and our beliefs about those lives and where they can be going. What sort of choices would you make if you had their capabilities and their beliefs?
You have to make smaller choices, that make you more the kind of person for who those choices would make sense and be practically achievable. And you have to see those smaller choices making you happier, having a positive effect on your life - to try and develop some sort of self-confidence and motivation.
That latter part is a very complex problem that impacts areas of life beyond just homelessness. It's no particular surprise that unemployment, teen pregnancy, low educational outcomes and so on tend to group together. They're all influenced, to lesser and greater extents, of to be somewhat pithy for a moment, 'Not having your shit together.'
Well get your shit together then.
Yeah, okay, how do we create an environment where that's gonna happen? Given that choices determine the sort of person you'll become and that determines your later choices, early intervention seems likely to be a part of it - perhaps through improving education to the poor. Maybe breaking up communities of homeless people and rehousing them into richer communities so they have better chances of falling within catchment areas of good schools - and aren't subject to a culture of generational poverty.
I don't know, those are just a couple of things. But, however it's done the basic act of assigning blame seems largely immaterial. The world is what it is, people make the choices they make. What matters is that people are suffering - and what's important is what can be done about it within the bounds of compassion and practicality.
Eating out is a great way to stay poor.
The first is that when you have a refrigerator that's sub-par and don't have a freezer, you have to buy the smallest quantities of anything perishable; that means it's expensive as hell. There are things like rice that you can buy in bulk, but if you're in a place with bugs and rodents (like they are), you're screwed on that too, generally.
The second is that if you're in a homeless shelter, you can't cook. At most, you can make a sandwich, but that goes back to point #1.
Eating out isn't a convenience for them; it's survival.
Refrigerators are easily found used for under $100 (just like the flat screen TV from someone else's example here).
Eating out, at a minimum, is 2-3x ingredient cost.
Besides, you're reading way more into my comment than was intended. Its substance was:
"To save money, don't eat out."
You're projecting.
The mom is drinking a beer on the bus, isn't she? I'm guessing that because it's in a brown paper bag.
I would hope 2). Because here's the thing: we can't extricate ourselves from our history, and the people closest to the problem have a lot more information about it than those moralizing from afar. There's a bunch of questions you don't bother to ask yourself:
Was the container of Chinese food actually purchased or found? Who knows. Probably, but the parents don't seem to make a habit of it: the daughter makes her siblings PB&Js. And is it a crazy expense? Also who knows, but buying a couple containers of cooked white rice in NYC isn't going to be crazy expensive.
Are there nearby grocery stores to buy actual food? Maybe, but more likely the nearest places will be liquor stores selling shitty food for outrageous prices.
Does the facility they're in provide the means to cook raw ingredients? Probably not.
Is the electricity supplied consistent enough to trust having more than a single meal in the fridge? Who knows.
And perhaps the biggest thing: do the parents have the capability to plan to cook and to succeed in that endeavor? You might say that "these people deserve to suffer if they can't manage to cook rice and beans," but here's the thing: maybe they can't. Maybe they never picked up that skill, maybe drugs have destroyed their capabilities for planning more than a minute ahead. But regardless, they can't.
In tech, we recognize that we have to build systems out of potentially faulty components. But when we're building a society, there's a strain of thought saying that you shouldn't design for fault, because if a component is faulty, it deserves to be dumped into a garbage bin.
That's perverse.
"I'm curious: if you found another engineer who was in a messy codebase doing something something seemingly crazy, would you 1) assume they're an idiot or 2) reserve judgment until you know more?"
I might say:
"Having a messy codebase is a way to keep having bugs."
That's analogous to my original statement.
"In a good month, their combined efforts can bring in a few hundred dollars."
They are in a situation where they cannot afford to save money in most conventional ways.
Spending $100 on a fridge that they can't properly use (because they can't cook in a shelter) isn't a wise appropriation of a significant portion of their monthly income.
When you're poor, homeless, and don't own a car, moving refrigerators is not practical.
When you're poor and living in a nightmare hole of a shelter, your nice new fridge might well be just taken from you.
A friend of mine recently, moved into social housing. I donated some of my furniture to him for free. I also paid 50 euros for a moving van and 20 to have some guys help me.
The furniture cost $0 to him, a little bit to me.
Blasphemy!
In order to have food stored, it basically has to be packaged in plastic or glass. Peanut butter. Jelly. Bread.
A jar of peanut butter is the perfect food for someone without fridge or pantry. It can be stored at room temperature, it is calorie-dense, it is cheap, and it actually has some nutritional value.
If I am ever forced to live at poverty income without basic residential infrastructure, I would definitely walk to the nearest actual grocery store and carry back peanut butter. You can also keep eggs around a while, even in the US, if you can replace the cuticle (removed during processing) with wax. I'd probably cook them in their shells with an electric kettle, dip them in paraffin from plumbers' candles, and put them back into the container.
If you have some method of heating, you can add pasta and rice and beans and oats and sweet potatoes and lentils.
If people are really lacking these tools, I'd be happy to write a check to a New York charity that provides them.
(re your last point, I don't see how this family is going to take advantage of incremental assistance like that)
Whether that's true or not depends where you live. The US and Europe have developed different systems for egg production and storage.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325540
Obviously none of the things I listed will form a complete diet, but if you are eating mostly take-out they are probably a superior substitute for some fraction of those take-out meals.
No, this isn't a technical problem. It's bigger than that.
Eating normal food, with some organics but not all, is reasonably affordable if you're willing to cook.
That takes longer, but results are better.
I don't know how people afford to eat out. It seems that unless you go Taco Bell (and there's no shame in that) two people is $25-50 per meal.
Reading Daeken's comment would be a good start toward turing that around.
It's an effective piece -- it's able to wring fresh emotion from people who've been hearing similar stories for decades and have become desensitized. But it's not a policy discussion, and it's not even a good starting point for a policy decision.
Source: former journalist.
A culture of independence.
What do we have to show for our recent hosting bubble?
I now feel very sorry for Dasani, and am more sure than ever that I won't be spending time in New York. If that was the point of the article, then well done.
The question most New Yorker's should be asking is, how do the people who run this facility (Audburn) have jobs? How do the people the report to allow it to happen and if they do, they why are they employed? Having been around some big city "care" its really simply, the bigger the government the less it has to care and the more people that slip through the cracks. Too many programs competing for the same dollars, too many programs with their own rules they barely serve anyone, too many programs for those who need help they have to spend an inordinate amount of time applying to each.
I am quite sure the living conditions don't help the outlook of her parents and in part keeps them down looking for releases. Yet for all the billions spent to take care of the poor it makes you wonder, where is it all going?
The poor conditions have to do with the budget constraints, which the GOP is actively pushing for.
Usually there will be some outrage over a small sum of money being used inappropriately. Benzes for welfare queens for example. The politicians will do something about it by putting in more checks. A few scammers will work the system. More checks are put in place. Ad infinitum. A few years later 50-80% of the budget to help the poor has gone into making sure they use the aid for what we deem appropriate.
This is part of why the arts scene there is so vibrant: "starving artists" have always been able to get by in New York in a way that they couldn't elsewhere.
(Though even they've gotten squeezed in modern times: Roger Ebert quoted John Malkovich saying back in 1989 that "to have starving actors, you have to have a place for them to starve. New York is too expensive for that. You can't afford to starve there anymore." http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/slaves-of-new-york-1989)
Putting living there aside and just looking at visiting, though: if you never visit NYC, you're missing out on one of the great urban experiences the world has to offer. If you're at all interested in the things cities have to offer, it should be a bucket-list destination.
I don't know about "great place to be poor," but yes, it's a great place to be if you're rich. I have a friend who used to live there, and he said that based literally on your income alone you will get invited to parties and be able to make friends with other rich people. The place is basically the epitome of rich people wanting to associate only with other rich people.
While the statement makes some assumptions, I do think that NYC provides many more services and fallbacks for the very poor that you don't find, say, in Appalachia.
The linked article presents a quite bleak existence, but many of the problems it brings to light are that the services the city provides are of low quality, whereas there are so many places where those types of services don't exist at all. Rural poverty in America can be, from what I understand, far more persistent than most urban poverty.
The fact is that NYC will always have a ton of poor people. It's almost guaranteed by virtue of its providing subsidized housing, etc, that all the poor from the surrounding areas will migrate to NYC.
Just to take one small example, De Blasio talks about the two New Yorks, but meanwhile he took a lot of money from the large taxi medallion owning companies, and is threatening to close down the new apple green outer boroughs taxis. That's a program that unequivocally targets the "other NY".
I agree. He's a strong leader who didn't start doing everything "for the poor" and instead focused on making the city strong and beating back the criminal element that ruined it.
That's never popular with the self-pity/white knighting crowd (who seem to have discovered HN, alas).
What can be done- what is the right mix of social policy and tough love? Clearly homeless drug users shouldn't have 8 kids- but how can this be prevented? Should we take away children from all homeless or drug addict parents as soon as they're born? How do other civilized countries handle this situation?
It makes me sick that I pay around 40% in state and federal taxes and social security (not that much lower than Western European countries) yet there is still so much poverty and poverty related issues in our country.
And I think the solution is raise the minimum wage and set a long term plan for a sort of guaranteed minimum income / negative income tax. Throwing money at the problem is literally the best way to solve it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-to-c...
I still don't know how much the parent pays in taxes, but that didn't include state tax, either income, property, or sales tax.
I'm obviously estimating, but when I look at which is more likely, someone misunderstanding tax brackets, or someone paying an insane amount of property tax in a state that doesn't exist, the first choice seems more likely.
I said "I still don't know how much the parent pays in taxes."
The GP might be counting all their payroll deductions as kinda a "tax" depending on how you look at it. It doesn't matter, I just pointed out you didn't include state taxes.
That's a bit of a cheat, though, since "taxable income" is the number you get after accounting for all the politically contrived deductions and exemptions. As a percentage of my total income it's more like 25%, and if I also don't include FICA (since that's just the government holding onto my money for me until I'm old, right?) it goes all the way down to 12%.
That said, 25% is the reality, although it does feel like 40% sometimes.
You clearly didn't read the whole article. This particular family inherited $40k but spent it on heroin. The naivety of that Atlantic article is astounding.
I think New York City has done an absolute ton for this family. This girl might have done okay, except her mother encourages her to fight her peers (and the mom picks fights with store clerks in front of her children). That is ultimately going to be her downfall, and I am not sure what the city is supposed to do.
Dasani's story is sad and it happens far too often. For whatever reason there are plenty of people (like the parents in this article) who will fuck up every chance that you give them.
Being from a crime-ridden, poor city I have to see this every day.
I wonder how much of this has to do with scale. Americans often look to European countries as models of what governments should do, but I think we often forget that most of those countries have smaller populations than New York City[0]. And, if I can vaguely trust what I'm reading, many of the larger countries have poverty issues that are not unlike those of the U.S.
So, your 40% tax rate is used to combat the issues of ~313 million people across wildly different situations. I'm sure that if NYC could collect a 40% tax rate and implemented programs focused on its own issues, the government could do a lot more to combat poverty. But, NYC only gets a piece of the pie, and the federal government needs to figure out how to help the homeless in NYC as well as the homeless in Washington, DC, and Chicago, IL, and.....
Given that, I tend to think there is not a technocratic solution to poverty in the U.S.--that is, it isn't just that we haven't quite found the proper program, or implemented it properly. Homelessness and poverty have been around for a long time, and while during some periods, some governments may have done alright in dealing with it, no one is ever going to turn a knob and make poverty magically disappear. That's not say we shouldn't try, but we also need plenty of organizations that simply get out there and provide basic help for the homeless (food, shelter, etc).
[0] I'm making a broad generalization, yes.
NYC has an income tax on top of state and federal income taxes. It's based on NYS taxable income. For example, at $65,000/yr you'll pay $2,047 + 3.648% of 5,000, for a total of $2,229.4[0].
0. http://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/it/nyc_tax_rate_sche...
a good start would be to find ways of eliminating "poor taxes" (i.e. the myriad ways in which poor people end up paying more than rich people for the same goods and services), and to replace intrusive criterion-based aid programs with simply giving the poor money (something that studies have proven to be more effective), possibly by way of a negative tax bracket.
Maybe the problem isn't the money involved, but the methods involved. After all, they say that to repeat the same actions and expect different results is a form of pathology.
For example according to this table Germany spends 27.4% of GDP on welfare (excluding education), while the US only spends 14.8% of GDP.
You may not be an IT guy, but you are computer savvy. You'll be invaluable for jobs like:
By helping this way, you'll improve the productivity of the organization drastically, which will have a real impact you can feel good about. Best off, your contribution will act as a multiplier, lasting well beyond the initial time you'll put in.--
If you're more able to giving money than time, please visit and consider donating to http://greensborohousingcoalition.com - this is a non-profit in Greensboro, NC, which does amazing work both in preventing homelessness and making sure that safe housing is available for low-income families.
My stepmother is the director of this organization, and I can speak to her and the GHC staff's incredible hard work and dedication. They manage to run at only a 15% overhead, which is truly incredible. Your money will have an impact here.
I think we have a tendency to want to use our Special Talents to help people, when that's not always the most effective thing to do. For example, I prefer building websites for non-profits any day of the week to running anti-virus, but that's often not nearly as helpful as just upgrading everyone's copy of Internet Explorer and removing all the toolbars (speaking from first hand experience here; I've done both). Also, if you only have a day or two to offer, you need to be realistic about what you can finish. No one benefits from work half-done, and everything needs maintenance.
So instead of waiting for the perfect storm of Your Skills meets The Perfect Charity, just go down to the office of a charity you care about and offer to help with IT stuff. Its not glamorous, and you might not self-identify as an IT person, but you'll be more able to help than you might realize.
You seriously won't believe what you'll find. For example, new laptops purchased from a big box have so much crap starting up that they make the laptop run poorly. It might seem obvious to you what programs should be uninstalled and easy for you to do it, but that's not true for other people.
Just email them and say you'd like to setup a chair in their office X day(s), all day, and anyone with any computer problems should come see you and you'll do your best to help, no job too small. I think you'll find your offer well received and useful, but there's certainly no harm in testing it out.
As a computer person, you're in a unique position to help and you can have a big impact. Don't dismiss this idea so easily!
Volunteer work in general is mostly about spending some of your time to get a good feeling for yourself, and advertising the charities in question. Basically everyone who haves a profession of any kind gets the best ROI in charity for their time by working, and donating the money earned doing so. This is abstract and feels less like helping people, but if your purpose really is to help and not purchasing happiness for yourself, it's what you should do.
Homelessness is a complex problem but if you want to help that child, the second best bet is to help her parents. Help with whatever problems they have, help with overcoming racial bias, mental illness, drug addiction, poor cv, whatever.
The first best bet is of course to pay for her scholarship to a boarding school. which rather stuffs her baby sister. Complicated.
I assume you are some kind of fairly well paid professional -- work an extra three hours a week and donate the extra money to e.g. a food pantry. You will do them a lot more good than spending those same three hours doing unskilled labor for them.
Has GiveWell done evaluations of programs to end homelessness?
The volunteering doesn't benefit the organization so much as it benefits oneself, and by extension society at large by removing one more potential spigot of hateful nonsense.
To truly describe complex issues, readers need the ability to both get a high-level view of the story and drill down to details and smaller narratives at times. Along those lines, I'm not sure why primary source material (raw transcripts of interviews, unpublished photos, links to source material) aren't included in even short reports by default.
In my mind, complex stories should be reported in a format similar to a small, mostly self-contained wiki where more details are linked or hidden by default.
The lack of innovation here surprises me because the news media is starving for reasons for people to consume their content. Involved, wiki-style reporting would be very hard to rip off.
Does anyone know of other places in the US that has taken this approach to poverty and what the results are? I am genuinely interested in understanding how "empowering the poor" works in the US. I know there are several reported successes with micro-lending to the poor in other countries, but I wonder if such go-getter mentality exists in the American society.
He took the time to set up a very simple website to register "runners" for the event ($25 is asked per person, but not everyone pays, obviously), and got the permission from the city to have a few police officers make sure participants weren't run over. Truth is, it is more of a community event almost like a parade, where some people wear turkey hats, dress up their dogs in costumes, and everyone has a little fun Thankgiving morning before everyone overeats later in the day. But if you want to run 5k you can. Most walk.
In any event, that first year a few hundred people attended. This year, it's estimated that over three thousand people participated. You can do the math for the ticket sales. Several of us volunteer our time to support this annual event now (I do the postcards & posters). This year we even received generous corporate sponsorships to further reduce overhead costs.
It's only once a year, so it isn't a huge time drain. But the impact is incredible and does help a lot of people in need. If almost every neighborhood could do this...
In my experience with a few charities whose websites I've been brought in to rescue, they're often left in disarray after they hired a well meaning but inexperienced developer who they were introduced to through personal connections. This works well initially, but becomes costly to maintain - both in terms of financial cost and managerial time spent overseeing the project.
If you can commit to either a monthly check-in to keep the website fresh, or to helping them build a more sustainable workflow so that they can easily update their own content, that could have a huge ROI for them in terms of fundraising, finding volunteers, and, perhaps most importantly, reaching the people who need their help.
As it relates to homelessness, many homeless people have access to the internet via a mobile device or library. For these people, an intuitive website can be the best way to connect with charities and receive their aid. Many charities still don't have responsive sites, so they're essentially cut off from reaching the mobile population. I think the ROI on that alone would be a great place to start.
I grew up poor, although not as poor as her. I know how frustrating and difficult it is for talented, ambitious children. I got lucky, but there were so many ways it could have gone wrong, and nearly did.
But here's what worries me, and should worry lots of people. Call it arrogance, but I firmly believe real progress in our society is made by those top few percent with both the talent and ambition to do something new, something dangerous and important. Most people either can't or won't. So when society wastes one of them in the ghetto, it hurts all of us.
However, for those with in demand, high value skills like people HN, I suggest you focus your time on using those skills effectively. You can do more good by just earning more income and donating money to good charities than donating your time.
To illustrate this point, consider this extreme case -- what if a young Steve Jobs had poured extra energy into serving soup at a local church to the homeless and had not gotten Apple off the ground? Yes, he would directly help hungry people. However, he has created so much wealth by forming Apple that not only does he have far more money that he could give away, but he's also created an entire company of employees with more wealth that they could also choose to give to charity.
Especially when it came to his illegitimate children. As much as I dislike Microsoft, Gates has done a billion times more for the poverty-stricken than Jobs ever did. Please do not hold Jobs up as some epitome of philanthropy. He was absolutely not, at least publicly.
If you do this you could also work with one of the homeless charities and explain what you are doing so that they can help provide support. Helping at a soup kitchen is admirable, however that doesn't solve the problem of needing somewhere secure, safe and stable to live.
http://yearup.org/
Something like the mentioned shelter in the article would not survive a single day under inspection. If a landlord would rent (or let people live in) such a house, he would immediately 1) have all people taken out by government and 2) find himself in jail or with hefty fines. I wonder why NYC let this shelter open despite dozens upon dozens of complaints!
France/Great Britain, in contrast, are not very favorable target countries: France has a strong nationalist/right-wing extremist political movement (Le Pen's Front National), and Great Britain, while rich, is not covered by Schengen agreement and excepted from a lot of EU regulations - so it's both difficult to get into, and stay in.
1) http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/arbeiterstrich-in-muench...
2) http://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/aufstand-geschaeftsleute-geg...
3) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeiterstrich
4) http://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/inhalt.im-hauptbahnhofvi...
5) http://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/tid-34337/armutszuwanderun...
These all deal with the situation in Munich, but it's the same in Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hamburg and other German cities.
So much talent shows up in unexpected places, but in a bifurcated America (or Mexico) it has to fight too hard to make itself seen.