09 February, 2006

Me and my big mouth

Another meeting listening to all these people saying what homeless people need and what they are doing. Then I stand up and say hello and that I used to be homeless and now have my own flat and I have learned all this but I still can't get a job. So for people in hostels and so forth what chance do they have, when if they get a job every penny earned will be for rent God forbid they have to eat as well. Then they all look at me in astonishment you know that look of who the hell is he and what does he know anyway. I think that's the way most people see me. I have an idea and in head first I go but that's not me, although sometimes I have to admit my mouth does work before my brain. So I explained what I thought was really needed about fair rents for people that work and that live in temporary accommodation. The need for jobs after all the training courses go on. The need for some sort of liaison with the business world besides the donation side of things. As I said getting people ready for work is all well and good and getting them as volunteers is ok but if you're on the same wave length as most. The idea of empowering people is to get them into employment, to give that motivation. So they can put what they have learned in to effect plus by paying for their own rent, food and other bills. It gets them back into the main stream of society and they can turn round to anyone and say well I now pay my taxes as well. Which is the main aim of most homeless charities.
These are the people that we sort of put to one side for years and years and there are still three hundred and eighty thousand of them. If only has always been the question on most peoples lips but lets start using the words we'll try this first and learn more along the way. Not the other way round. It's only by trying things that we can start to make some in roads into this problem. The never ending cycle of homelessness has to stop sometime . Why not make little in roads into it now? You never know in a hundred years it might be gone for good.

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