If you want to do a van pool as suggested in my last post to put unsheltered street homeless into underutilized hostel rooms in winter, you don't have to treat homeless people like they are five and do everything for them. I suggest you PLAN to NOT find them roommates to bunk with, plan to (generally) NOT pay for the room, etc.
The goal should be providing transportation and a means to ORGANIZE it and some MINOR supporting stuff to facilitate making it more feasible for street homeless to access, who tend to be poorer than those living out of a car and have challenges accessing resources like this because they lack transportation and bus service has its limits.
Rest assured, SOME homeless in the area already take advantage of the low cost hostels when they have a few bucks, but they are probably those living out of their vehicle who can drive out there. I've overhead people talk about doing this, so, NO, I am not simply making an assumption.
How would you design a program like this from scratch? Well, try to NOT have to do it all entirely from scratch.
You can start by making sure you actually clicked on all the links in my last post and then also read anything else those posts link to.
Then go looking for examples of similar programs. Look for news articles about incidents where they put homeless people into hotels in emergency situations and start finding out all you can about how they did it, what went well, what went badly, etc.
You might want to first examine programs where they provided emergency relief to the NEWLY homeless post-disaster, such as after a wild fire burned down an entire neighborhood or post hurricane, because those tend to be thought up as relief for unfortunate people who were middle class until "an act of God" struck and those programs tend to NOT be framed like "Surely, this really bad idea that no middle class person would put up with will be acceptable to The Homeless."
Use publicly available sources of information to start. If that's leaving you a lot of unanswered questions, consider contacting folks if you can find contact info and asking more questions.
Tuesday night and Wednesday night during their off season are probably your cheapest nights. I would plan to start with ONE night per week and potentially expand it to two if it goes well.
Make a list of establishments at parks in the area, distance to each, look info up online and put together a file and put together as MUCH info as you can from public sources. Then call them and ask them how many empty rooms they typically have on their cheapest nights in the off season.
Start researching van pools. A critical figure is how many people will your van seat? You want some idea how many people you can transport, how many rooms you can probably get and then some means to figure out how to answer the complicated math question of (varying number of people per room) x (number of rooms) = (capacity of the van).
Because you have two upper limits you need to account for: Capacity of the van and how many rooms you can get. If you can only get five rooms total and the van holds ten people and everyone who signs up wants to go solo, will you take a half empty van? Will you look for more rooms at other hostels and extend the route for that night to try to fill the van?
Figure out how many rooms you can reasonably expect to come up with, where they are, what they cost, what kind of van pool route it would take to service them, what is a reasonable route. Like x and y spots are near each other and twenty minutes away and between the two you can probably come up with five rooms reliably on a Wednesday night. Some other place is nowhere near them and farther out, it is NOT a good candidate for testing a pilot program BUT keep a file on it because it MAY become useful later if the program expands OR if this program becomes a seed generator for OTHER programs (and I will say more about that later in the post).
Make sure to call it a PILOT PROGRAM. You need to do that because that means "We do NOT have all the details worked out. You can EXPECT things to change based on how this goes."
I worked at a Fortune 200 company and saw a new program created and some big wig pulled a figure out of thin air and they stuck with that figure and never revisited it. When the program had problems, they tweaked OTHER things.
Do NOT do that. Be willing to find out "Oh, this is a STUPID idea and does not work AT ALL, BUT it has led us to figure out what COULD work, so let's scrap the ENTIRE thing and start over."
Do not hold ANY of this sacred. Be willing to pivot, as they say in startup land.
Go to local homeless services and/or free meal sites and start TALKING to homeless people. Tell them you are CONSIDERING creating a van pool for one or maybe two nights a week in winter to PROVIDE TRANSIT for up to X people to hostels at public parks. Ask them if they could AFFORD $12 to $60 (explain why the variation) one night once in a while to get in out of the rain, have access to a shower, wifi, etc. and ask if they would be interested.
Consider having a SIGN UP SHEET. "We will do a van if we can get enough people. If you can't afford $60/night (or whatever the actual cost is based on YOUR up to date research), find buddies to help get the cost down. (You need to find buddies on your own. We are not helping with that). If you get ONE buddy, it's $30 apiece. If you get two, it's $20 apiece. (etc)"
IF NECESSARY, you can try to find funds to DEFRAY the cost of the room a la "We can cover HALF THE COST of the room. If you get FOUR buddies to bunk with you, you can all be out of the rain and have wifi and showers tonight for $6 apiece." But don't go there if you don't have to. Your goal should be providing transportation, not paying for the room.
Only consider paying some portion of the room cost if that is the ONLY way this will work. If you get people telling you "Yeah, I could afford $5 for that but not more." and enough people say that, then you may find yourself seeing that this CAN be done, but ONLY if someone helps defray the room cost.
Figure out WHERE you need to have the sign up sheet. You might put it at a free meal site or at a homeless services program.
Figure out what it will cost to have a van go out in the evening and go the next day around 11 or noon depending on their checkout times to pick people up and bring them back. Figure out how to cover it financially and logistically.
Put together paper printouts with maps and info about WHERE you are taking them so they aren't lost.
When I was homeless, I used to stay in a cheap hotel in Fresno and the front desk had paper printouts with a map of the hotel and it showed the nearby establishments -- the 7-Eleven, the McDonald's, etc. Without that, I wouldn't have FOUND the 7-Eleven when I needed sodas at 2 a.m. and the hotel vending machines were empty, even though the 7-Eleven was practically in the parking lot of the hotel.
People have trouble finding stuff in strange places and under stressful circumstances.
It's August. It's probably about eight weeks until the rainy season starts, so that gives a good window to do the legwork and shoot for starting a pilot program in October or November.
But don't stress about it. Rest assured, people will still need relief in December or January or February if it takes longer than eight weeks to make arrangements. It's NOT time sensitive. There will still be homeless people and inclement weather NEXT year if nothing comes together this year.
Keep it clear in your mind that the program needs to meet THREE goals or tests to be a success:
Safety should be your number one priority and this is why you should have people SELF SELECT their buddies and NOT take on that job and you also need to find some way to be flexible about how many people you are putting in a room. Safety and flexibility is why you need to make them probably pay at least PART of the cost because if you give it away free, some of your worst behaved homeless people will WANT IT, will feel ENTITLED and will act like you OWE THEM.
If you plan on PAYING the full cost of the rooms AND driving them out there, what will happen is you will end up pressured to put five people in every room to get the most bang for your buck and then SOMEONE is going to be assaulted, possibly sexually. And you will possibly be sued.
If it is primarily transportation with a LITTLE bit of other help to organize it and address a few other hiccups but they are expected to pay for it, then they can decide "I'm all kinds of drama and I would rather pay $60 one night a month and have the room to myself than to have roommates." Or they may have a lot of friends and may decide "If I get enough of my buddies to go, I can afford this once a week, every week if it's just $12 for me."
In contrast, if YOU pay for it and ALSO commit to accommodating all the issues of all your high drama people, your donors will want five people in every room to do the most good for the most people and your clientele -- the homeless participants -- will want a room to themselves BECAUSE "You paid for HER to have her own room so she wouldn't get raped but you make the guys all stay together. I am filing a lawsuit. GENDER DISCRIMINATION." and other stupid nonsense.
So just don't go there. That's unlikely to go good places.
An additional benefit of letting them arrange whom they room with and how many: It will give people a shelter option who are de facto excluded by MOST shelters.
I never stayed in a shelter while homeless in part because I was on the street with my adult special-needs sons. The shelter system was unwilling or unable to let us stay together as a family, even though so MANY Americans have their young adult children still living with mom and dad that "Obamacare" requires health insurance companies to cover children up to age 26.
I have also seen LGBTQ individuals say the shelter system does NOT serve them well. It does not take unmarried same sex couples, usually does not take pets and there are a variety of other completely normal family situations for middle class people that will exclude you from most homeless shelters.
So start with making it a VAN POOL, NOT a program to PAY FOR HOTEL ROOMS. Do NOT take responsibility for them and their behavior and blah blah blah, though blacklist them if the hostel tells you one of them is an ass. Assure the hostel you do NOT expect them to be a charity and put up with bad behavior. You are trying to fatten their bottom line and fill some of their empty rooms in the off season, not cause them trouble in the name of "compassion" for the homeless. If anyone is trouble, the hostel can just tell you and the troublemaker won't be given rides out there again by your program.
You are trying to facilitate homeless individuals getting access to shelter in winter and access to shower facilities and you are also trying to improve the bottom line of the hostel. The homeless participants need to behave like ANY OTHER customer. This is NOT a homeless shelter or an addiction treatment program or whatever.
It's something they could potentially arrange themselves and SOME ALREADY DO. I did while homeless. I took a bus 14 miles to a dive hotel to get in out of the storm and paid for it myself.
You are just trying to grease the wheels a little and make it more feasible to get out there and back and help make it easier for them to access a resource SOME ALREADY use on the down low.
If you do this, you may have people asking for related things, like hotel vouchers because "I'm living out of my van with family and I would love to do this, but your van pool doesn't help me. I can drive out there myself. What would help me is funds to help cover the cost."
Cool. Write that down and start a file and let them know you appreciate the feedback and will see what you can do, BUT this program ONLY DOES X and that's it (though it may change).
Non-profits have a tendency to experience program drift. Stay focused on what you are trying to accomplish here and why, but be open to learning from it and having it SEED additional programs.
Possible additional related ideas that you can start SEPARATE files for:
That way if you need FIVE rooms for TEN people or THREE rooms for nine people or whatever, you can make sure the ROOMS are actually available once you get out there.
Possible pain points:
The goal should be providing transportation and a means to ORGANIZE it and some MINOR supporting stuff to facilitate making it more feasible for street homeless to access, who tend to be poorer than those living out of a car and have challenges accessing resources like this because they lack transportation and bus service has its limits.
Rest assured, SOME homeless in the area already take advantage of the low cost hostels when they have a few bucks, but they are probably those living out of their vehicle who can drive out there. I've overhead people talk about doing this, so, NO, I am not simply making an assumption.
How would you design a program like this from scratch? Well, try to NOT have to do it all entirely from scratch.
You can start by making sure you actually clicked on all the links in my last post and then also read anything else those posts link to.
Then go looking for examples of similar programs. Look for news articles about incidents where they put homeless people into hotels in emergency situations and start finding out all you can about how they did it, what went well, what went badly, etc.
You might want to first examine programs where they provided emergency relief to the NEWLY homeless post-disaster, such as after a wild fire burned down an entire neighborhood or post hurricane, because those tend to be thought up as relief for unfortunate people who were middle class until "an act of God" struck and those programs tend to NOT be framed like "Surely, this really bad idea that no middle class person would put up with will be acceptable to The Homeless."
Use publicly available sources of information to start. If that's leaving you a lot of unanswered questions, consider contacting folks if you can find contact info and asking more questions.
Tuesday night and Wednesday night during their off season are probably your cheapest nights. I would plan to start with ONE night per week and potentially expand it to two if it goes well.
Make a list of establishments at parks in the area, distance to each, look info up online and put together a file and put together as MUCH info as you can from public sources. Then call them and ask them how many empty rooms they typically have on their cheapest nights in the off season.
Start researching van pools. A critical figure is how many people will your van seat? You want some idea how many people you can transport, how many rooms you can probably get and then some means to figure out how to answer the complicated math question of (varying number of people per room) x (number of rooms) = (capacity of the van).
Because you have two upper limits you need to account for: Capacity of the van and how many rooms you can get. If you can only get five rooms total and the van holds ten people and everyone who signs up wants to go solo, will you take a half empty van? Will you look for more rooms at other hostels and extend the route for that night to try to fill the van?
Figure out how many rooms you can reasonably expect to come up with, where they are, what they cost, what kind of van pool route it would take to service them, what is a reasonable route. Like x and y spots are near each other and twenty minutes away and between the two you can probably come up with five rooms reliably on a Wednesday night. Some other place is nowhere near them and farther out, it is NOT a good candidate for testing a pilot program BUT keep a file on it because it MAY become useful later if the program expands OR if this program becomes a seed generator for OTHER programs (and I will say more about that later in the post).
Make sure to call it a PILOT PROGRAM. You need to do that because that means "We do NOT have all the details worked out. You can EXPECT things to change based on how this goes."
I worked at a Fortune 200 company and saw a new program created and some big wig pulled a figure out of thin air and they stuck with that figure and never revisited it. When the program had problems, they tweaked OTHER things.
Do NOT do that. Be willing to find out "Oh, this is a STUPID idea and does not work AT ALL, BUT it has led us to figure out what COULD work, so let's scrap the ENTIRE thing and start over."
Do not hold ANY of this sacred. Be willing to pivot, as they say in startup land.
Go to local homeless services and/or free meal sites and start TALKING to homeless people. Tell them you are CONSIDERING creating a van pool for one or maybe two nights a week in winter to PROVIDE TRANSIT for up to X people to hostels at public parks. Ask them if they could AFFORD $12 to $60 (explain why the variation) one night once in a while to get in out of the rain, have access to a shower, wifi, etc. and ask if they would be interested.
Consider having a SIGN UP SHEET. "We will do a van if we can get enough people. If you can't afford $60/night (or whatever the actual cost is based on YOUR up to date research), find buddies to help get the cost down. (You need to find buddies on your own. We are not helping with that). If you get ONE buddy, it's $30 apiece. If you get two, it's $20 apiece. (etc)"
IF NECESSARY, you can try to find funds to DEFRAY the cost of the room a la "We can cover HALF THE COST of the room. If you get FOUR buddies to bunk with you, you can all be out of the rain and have wifi and showers tonight for $6 apiece." But don't go there if you don't have to. Your goal should be providing transportation, not paying for the room.
Only consider paying some portion of the room cost if that is the ONLY way this will work. If you get people telling you "Yeah, I could afford $5 for that but not more." and enough people say that, then you may find yourself seeing that this CAN be done, but ONLY if someone helps defray the room cost.
Figure out WHERE you need to have the sign up sheet. You might put it at a free meal site or at a homeless services program.
Figure out what it will cost to have a van go out in the evening and go the next day around 11 or noon depending on their checkout times to pick people up and bring them back. Figure out how to cover it financially and logistically.
Put together paper printouts with maps and info about WHERE you are taking them so they aren't lost.
When I was homeless, I used to stay in a cheap hotel in Fresno and the front desk had paper printouts with a map of the hotel and it showed the nearby establishments -- the 7-Eleven, the McDonald's, etc. Without that, I wouldn't have FOUND the 7-Eleven when I needed sodas at 2 a.m. and the hotel vending machines were empty, even though the 7-Eleven was practically in the parking lot of the hotel.
People have trouble finding stuff in strange places and under stressful circumstances.
It's August. It's probably about eight weeks until the rainy season starts, so that gives a good window to do the legwork and shoot for starting a pilot program in October or November.
But don't stress about it. Rest assured, people will still need relief in December or January or February if it takes longer than eight weeks to make arrangements. It's NOT time sensitive. There will still be homeless people and inclement weather NEXT year if nothing comes together this year.
Keep it clear in your mind that the program needs to meet THREE goals or tests to be a success:
- First: DO NO HARM. This should NOT cause problems for EITHER the homeless participants or the hostels.
- Provide additional shelter options for unsheltered homeless.
- Improve hygiene among the homeless by getting them additional access to middle-class quality showers.
Safety should be your number one priority and this is why you should have people SELF SELECT their buddies and NOT take on that job and you also need to find some way to be flexible about how many people you are putting in a room. Safety and flexibility is why you need to make them probably pay at least PART of the cost because if you give it away free, some of your worst behaved homeless people will WANT IT, will feel ENTITLED and will act like you OWE THEM.
If you plan on PAYING the full cost of the rooms AND driving them out there, what will happen is you will end up pressured to put five people in every room to get the most bang for your buck and then SOMEONE is going to be assaulted, possibly sexually. And you will possibly be sued.
If it is primarily transportation with a LITTLE bit of other help to organize it and address a few other hiccups but they are expected to pay for it, then they can decide "I'm all kinds of drama and I would rather pay $60 one night a month and have the room to myself than to have roommates." Or they may have a lot of friends and may decide "If I get enough of my buddies to go, I can afford this once a week, every week if it's just $12 for me."
In contrast, if YOU pay for it and ALSO commit to accommodating all the issues of all your high drama people, your donors will want five people in every room to do the most good for the most people and your clientele -- the homeless participants -- will want a room to themselves BECAUSE "You paid for HER to have her own room so she wouldn't get raped but you make the guys all stay together. I am filing a lawsuit. GENDER DISCRIMINATION." and other stupid nonsense.
So just don't go there. That's unlikely to go good places.
An additional benefit of letting them arrange whom they room with and how many: It will give people a shelter option who are de facto excluded by MOST shelters.
I never stayed in a shelter while homeless in part because I was on the street with my adult special-needs sons. The shelter system was unwilling or unable to let us stay together as a family, even though so MANY Americans have their young adult children still living with mom and dad that "Obamacare" requires health insurance companies to cover children up to age 26.
I have also seen LGBTQ individuals say the shelter system does NOT serve them well. It does not take unmarried same sex couples, usually does not take pets and there are a variety of other completely normal family situations for middle class people that will exclude you from most homeless shelters.
So start with making it a VAN POOL, NOT a program to PAY FOR HOTEL ROOMS. Do NOT take responsibility for them and their behavior and blah blah blah, though blacklist them if the hostel tells you one of them is an ass. Assure the hostel you do NOT expect them to be a charity and put up with bad behavior. You are trying to fatten their bottom line and fill some of their empty rooms in the off season, not cause them trouble in the name of "compassion" for the homeless. If anyone is trouble, the hostel can just tell you and the troublemaker won't be given rides out there again by your program.
You are trying to facilitate homeless individuals getting access to shelter in winter and access to shower facilities and you are also trying to improve the bottom line of the hostel. The homeless participants need to behave like ANY OTHER customer. This is NOT a homeless shelter or an addiction treatment program or whatever.
It's something they could potentially arrange themselves and SOME ALREADY DO. I did while homeless. I took a bus 14 miles to a dive hotel to get in out of the storm and paid for it myself.
You are just trying to grease the wheels a little and make it more feasible to get out there and back and help make it easier for them to access a resource SOME ALREADY use on the down low.
If you do this, you may have people asking for related things, like hotel vouchers because "I'm living out of my van with family and I would love to do this, but your van pool doesn't help me. I can drive out there myself. What would help me is funds to help cover the cost."
Cool. Write that down and start a file and let them know you appreciate the feedback and will see what you can do, BUT this program ONLY DOES X and that's it (though it may change).
Non-profits have a tendency to experience program drift. Stay focused on what you are trying to accomplish here and why, but be open to learning from it and having it SEED additional programs.
Possible additional related ideas that you can start SEPARATE files for:
- Hotel vouchers for FAMILIES with minor children for x number of nights per month.
- A van pool for anyone, even tourists, who would love to go stay at a hostel but don't own a car, a taxi is too expensive, etc. If there is enough demand to set up a standing daily van pool for anyone, you may even discontinue the homeless van pool because it may no longer be needed.
- Paying for hostel rooms and providing transit out and back for extreme weather events as overflow emergency shelter in the case of a disaster.
That way if you need FIVE rooms for TEN people or THREE rooms for nine people or whatever, you can make sure the ROOMS are actually available once you get out there.
Possible pain points:
- No Shows: If you ask the hostel to provide five rooms and not everyone who signed up shows up, the hostel may expect you to pay for those rooms because they turned away business to keep them available. You will need a No Show policy.
- Some people on the street operate on a cash only basis and will be able to cover the cost of the stay but NOT the deposit the hostel will expect for a cash customer. Decide if you are willing to provide the deposit. Let them know if you get it back, they can come out with you again but if they damage the room and the hostel actually keeps the deposit, they are done. You can't afford to let the hostel keep your deposit on a regular basis.
- If you have too much friction over No Shows and the like, you may want to say "Arrange a reservation ONLINE before signing up for the van." and then your issue will be they've made a commitment, will you drive them out there if it's only one person and not ten? Will you GUARANTEE them a ride? Because otherwise they may not want to take the risk of making a commitment to a room themselves.