Habitat for the Homeless - Three-year goals
Our goal for 2006 is to visit 10 US cities, via motorhome, starting in San Francisco, and spend four to six weeks to plan and build one of our media-grabbing Smallest Houses. We want to plant housing seeds in ten different cities and see which are the most receptive to our housing ideas. It's an ambitious project - one rivals the promising climate change jobs movement which is raising awareness on global warming - but we believe it's attainable.
We will simultaneously test our Adopt-a-Block/Park program locally from our existing rented flat in the Mission District under the guidance of a Delancey Street graduate with a degree in Public Administration. In our second and third years of operations, we will build our Adopt-a-Block/Park program and locate a few dozen ShelterOne houses on residential blocks around our volunteer house. We will also work to replicate our model in the nine other cities we visited in our 2006 tour, focusing on the most receptive.
To date we designed and built our prototype house, ShelterOne; procured our first volunteer house; have applied for a federal trademark of our name and logo; and are about to apply for 501c(3) status. We have persuaded San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to help us build our first ShelterOne house built exclusively by homeless labor as a test for doing the same in nine other US cities. We have developed blueprints for an eight-unit volunteer building above a Church parking lot that now serves the homeless and needs volunteer housing. We hope to cause to be built one of our ShelterEight volunteer houses in each of the nine cities we visit after we demonstrate the possibility of able-bodied homeless people building housing for themselves, by building a ShelterOne house with much media coverage.
We believe that our model can be self-sustaining in any city in America or the world and hope to test and prove this theory in our first three years. A model for our proposed success is Habitat for Humanity, which replicated itself in cities around the world through independent local chapters because the original idea was unique, simple, and replicatable.
ShelterOne, the Smallest House in America, is a publicity magnet. It is a complete house in just 100 square feet. A Habitat for the Homeless construction team will travel to nine American cities in our motor home and begin work developing local Chapters. We will contact the Mayor�s office and ask to be directed to the people responsible for housing the homeless. We will contact several prominent churches with parking lots and a history of feeding the homeless. We will contact the local Home Depot and ask them to begin a donation program asking their customers to donate the cost of a 2x4 to build a house for a homeless person. We will contact the local TV stations and newspapers and tell them we plan to build the Smallest House in (enter name of City,) using able-bodied homeless people taken directly from the streets. We will contact local drug and alcohol treatment programs for help in directing us to formerly homeless candidates for our Adopt-a-Block/Park programs. Within two weeks in any city, we will have all of the pieces in place to build the first of many ShelterOne houses with great fanfare and publicity. We will use the extensive media coverage to draw out building contractors who will train future volunteers; churches that will provide land above their parking lots; patrons who will make large and small contributions to our housing program; and citizens who will work to establish a Habitat for the Homeless chapter locally.
We believe that we can get a residential block to support a clean and sober volunteer who works daily to clean and beautify their neighborhood. We will solicit financial support by doing the following:
Habitat for the Homeless will take newly drug free and sober homeless people directly from a drug and alcohol treatment program and move them into our volunteer house. Here they will begin training to become a Neighborhood cleanup volunteer. We will use the Delancey Street model of "each one, teach one"; the volunteers take responsibility for each other's welfare and hold each other accountable for achieving the highest possible standards in everything they do. We will pair a new volunteer up with an experienced volunteer already working and living in a neighborhood, who will help them become established in an adjoining neighborhood. The Delancey Street model eliminates the need for paid supervisory staff.
Habitat for the Homeless and the new volunteer will identify a city block that has visible problems with litter, graffiti, and lifeless weedy sidewalks. The volunteer along with our video documentarian will tour the block and identify examples of litter, graffiti, and the lack of trees and flowers.
The short DVD film will be replicated and become a part of a volunteer introduction package that Habitat for the Homeless will produce for the volunteer (John.) John with the help of his sponsoring volunteer will knock on the door of each house on his soon to be adopted block and tell his new neighbor that he, John, is volunteering to clean up their block. The short DVD and brochure will explain the service. John will ask each neighbor to walk around the block in the coming week to verify the condition of the neighborhood before John begins his volunteer work. John will also ask the resident to give written permission for a street tree to be planted in front of his or her house. The tree will be planted by Friends of the Urban Forest and maintained to maturity by John or another Habitat for the Homeless volunteer who will live on that block.
After three months of training at the volunteer house, John and his fellow graduates will be placed in ShelterOne homes built on small pieces of land throughout the city. Alternate housing will be in ShelterEight housing groups placed on church parking lots. Each volunteer will help build the house that he will ultimately live in. This hands-on building experience provides dignity and a sense of ownership for the volunteer, along the Habitat for Humanity model. It is important to provide these formerly homeless addicts with something substantial to lose should they slide back into addiction.
Each volunteer will have the continuing support of their original drug and alcohol treatment program and their fellow Habitat for the Homeless mentors and trainees.
After three months working in his adopted neighborhood, the new Neighborhood Beautification Volunteer will again walk around his neighborhood with our video documentarian and establish visually that his block is clean and alive with trees and flowers, maintained by his efforts alone. This new film, on inexpensive mini-DVD and our fundraising brochure will establish the costs and benefits and ask that each neighbor make a monthly financial commitment to support the beautification of the street and the volunteer. Habitat for the Homeless will attempt to get a majority of neighbors to make an automatic monthly contribution directly to Habitat so that we can provide food, clothing, medical care, and a little spending money to the volunteer so that he or she can make the beautification of their neighborhood their full time job.
This holistic self-sustaining model for training volunteers, building housing, cleaning up, planting, and beautifying neighborhoods, and fundraising can be replicated in any neglected neighborhood worldwide.