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Social Media as a Refuge for the Homeless
His head was barely visible under the dark hood sheltering his face from the November wind, a pile of folded cardboard boxes shoved under two bursting bags by his side. Slouching against the front window of the Columbus Circle Starbucks, he tucked himself inside a green sleeping bag. The door beside him opened and closed repeatedly, but he never flinched. He was concentrating too deeply to notice, his face glowing dimly by the light of the screen just inches from his nose. A few people turned their heads as they passed for a second look at the homeless man — and his MacBook.
It sounds like an odd combination. We think of electronic devices as items of luxury; the iPhone a symbol of status, gadgets a sign of tech savvy. At the other end of the spectrum, the image of homelessness materializes clearly. It is a picture of unwashed men and women wearing ragtag clothes, muttering indistinct words, probably drunk, pushing a clattering grocery cart filled with odds and ends. The idea of shiny tablets and smartphones in the hands of those with no home and no job seems incongruous.
“People think the homeless all have mental issues or they’re scammers who don’t want to work,” says Carey Fuller, who lived in a vehicle with her two daughters for nearly a decade. “But many lost their jobs and homes during the financial crisis. Others are struggling families or homeless youth.”
A recent study at the USC School of Social Work found that 96 percent of the 436 homeless individuals interviewed had a cellphone. Among those, 61.7 percent had smartphones. These numbers are virtually parallel to the general adult American population: 90 percent own cellphones, 64 percent of which are smartphones. “A smartphone is an incredibly important lifeline for someone who is homeless,” says assistant professor Harmony Rhoades, who conducted the survey and intends to publish it in the second half of 2016. She explains that both cellphone and internet access can keep people from social isolation and help them integrate back into society.
“Technology is no longer considered a luxury,” says Leah Laxamana, a public policy program manager at Twitter. Like other industry giants, Twitter is attempting to advance community development and find ways to better answer social needs. “We see it as a basic,” Laxamana adds. To send a resume, apply for housing or fill out a financial aid form, one must have internet communication. Eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies require online job applications. In the next decade, the majority of jobs will demand digital literacy skills.
The proliferation of cheap wireless devices, the growing number of Wi-Fi access points and the prevalence of free services — such as email and social media — combine to create a home online for those lacking physical shelter. If you don’t pay rent, you are bound to be evicted. If you fail to pay the phone bill, your number will be disconnected. However, an email address or Facebook profile require no payment, and will remain open and active indefinitely, functioning for homeless people as the one constant under rapidly changing circumstances.
Yet homeless advocacy groups tend to view internet use as a treat rather than a need. The public, too, may question whether a cellphone is as necessary to a homeless person as food and shelter. Others may associate technology with entertainment and pleasure, which assumes a lower priority for those with extremely limited resources.
The famous proverb argues that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. What happens when you give a homeless person a smartphone? Does it just satisfy a momentary need, or could it serve as part of a long-term solution? In some cases, access to the internet and social media might be a way to battle loneliness and cultivate community. In others, it might be the primary means to find housing and employment. Homeless activists are creating online support systems, and those experiencing homelessness use the web to educate others and change perceptions of poverty. In cases of emergencies and natural disasters, the homeless are among the populations most likely to be affected; Communication by cellphone allows them to be alerted and assisted.
Social media poses potential risks, ranging from online predators to cyber-bullying. Owning a smartphone holds both real and virtual perils, with potentially grave consequences for vulnerable populations, including theft and violence. But does the positive impact outweigh the danger? In the fragile and shifting state of homelessness, could an online address serve as the one source of stability? And if so, how can social services and advocacy groups adapt to this new reality?
It may rain and I have to sleep on the train tonight, but God has given me you people to reach out and give me a reassuring cyber pat! Love turning on my Android tablet and getting all those Twitter notifications! This tablet has me on all day and I get stuff done! No pressure on when I have to get off like when I am at the Apple Store or library. One thing I hope. And maybe with your help, I can be indoors or fully-employed in a month or so!
James Christian Jr., periodically homeless since the late 1990s, began his online experiments connecting with people and finding new friends on MySpace and in chatrooms. In 2002, he discovered a blog called “Homeless Guy in Nashville.” Curious about the possibilities of an online diary, he started his own in New York. At Easy Internet café on 42nd Street, he began writing about his personal experiences and aspirations.
Born in Alaska in the summer of 1977, Christian grew up in North Carolina. He says he had a “difficult life” as a fostered, gay young man. He moved to New York City in 1998 and struggled with alcoholism, spending time in and out of jail, which made him unemployable. For 17 years he has been shuffling between temporary accommodations and street corners, including near the Presbyterian Church on East 64th Street and Park Avenue where he is able to shower. Christian says he prefers the streets to the overcrowded shelters, in which a night curfew is enforced and where he experienced continuous theft of his belongings.
When Facebook was introduced to the public in 2006, Christian was hooked. “I was fascinated by sharing my daily existence,” he says, his small, tender black eyes flickering. Despite the negative sentiment he says he sometimes gets from people who ask him, ‘Why are you on the internet when you’re supposed to be getting a job?’ he posts steadily, sometimes up to a dozen times a day. Facebook is an outlet for his experiences, from funny stories and videos he shares with his friends to comments about looking for work. At times, it is his only channel, as he wrote in September 2014:
It’s not always easy when I am around church friends. I sometimes need to talk or some help but they don’t seem to want to say anything about my homelessness when I am around.
That year, Christian found himself back on the street and decided to start sharing his story as widely as possible. He created a YouTube channel with a video-blog and signed up for a Twitter handle, a Vine profile and an Instagram account — exploring pretty much every existing, free online arena.
Using the handle @hopeisalive1977 and his blog “The Homeless Guy: NYC,” Christian shares his experiences with the world: what it is like to be sleeping on cardboard by a church (“It is getting chilly so I may be heading into a shelter soon”), where he takes his laundry and how many days he has maintained sobriety. “I WANNA LIVE!! NOT JUST SURVIVE!!!” he shouts in an October 2015 post. In another vlog, displayed to his more than 4,000 Facebook friends, he educates about services available to the homeless, such as “Midnight Run,” a volunteer organization distributing food and clothing on the streets of New York City.
After seeing his Youtube videos, social activist Mark Horvath bought him an Asus tablet. “When you have a tablet or a smartphone, resources are at your fingertips,” Christian says. “ I get support online, people check up on me. Someone from Minnesota just sent me a package, I contact sober groups online.”
Horvath, once homeless himself — 20 years ago, he was sleeping on L.A.’s Hollywood Boulevard — is currently a committed campaigner set on a venture to find the raw, unedited stories of homeless people. By creating online communities and hundreds of short video segments on a platform called Invisible People, Horvath is trying to bridge the gap between the homeless and the public. He whole-heartedly believes in the power of social networks to do so. When they first met, he was surprised by Christian’s ability to stay positive, and he saw that being online was a help. “I do a lot of research [online] on positive things, messages, stories on Youtube,” Christian told Horvath when the latter filmed him.
As access to technology grows, homeless people are often torn between the drive to share their stories and the instinct to hide them. Online they have the chance to be equals and an opportunity to build a socially accepted identity. In Christian’s case, he has opted to create awareness and spread motivational quotes. It is his own kind of personal therapy.
A couple of days before Thanksgiving, Christian announced to his followers that his caseworker had found him a temporary room at the YMCA in Harlem. “Now I am fully indoors!!!” he wrote. Christian, who hadn’t slept in his own bed since 2010, now constantly uses his phone to stay in contact with his caseworker because it is crucial for his housing, he says. He has recently been upgraded to a Bronx Safe Haven, a supportive housing facility, and continues to tweet and post several times a day. His new handle is @Fabulous1NYC.
United States of Homelessness
“Every time we walk by a homeless person, we leave a piece of our soul on that curb,” said New York governor Andrew Cuomo in his 2016 State of the State address. With more than 88,000 homeless people in New York State, that’s a lot of pieces of souls.
According to a census taken last year, almost 565,000 people were homeless on a single night across the country, California accounting for 21 percent of that population. But this number, based on a one-night annual estimate, has been disputed by organizations such as The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. The nonprofit roughly calculated that at least 2.5 to 3.5 million Americans sleep in shelters, transitional housing, and public places not meant for human habitation each year, including 1.35 million children.
In its latest report to Congress, The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development declared New York the state with the largest increase in homelessness: a 41 percent growth since 2007.
For decades, New York has been on an ongoing battle with this “true human crisis,” as Cuomo put it. The most notable rise began in 2011, when the governor pulled back state contributions to a rental subsidies program, and then-mayor Michael Bloomberg consequently dismantled it entirely. Mayor Bill de Blasio has vowed to tackle homelessness, a thorn in his administration and an additional cause for feud with the governor. The state has promised to double the current budget for supporting the homeless to a record 20 billion dollars over the next five years. The vast majority of homeless New Yorkers live in shelters, which are exploding with an all-time high of over 60,000 people. More than 3,000 people spend their night on the streets.
New York, of course, is not alone. Home of the original Skid Row, Seattle and King County have officially been in a state of emergency over homelessness since last November, following the death of over 45 homeless people on the streets in 2015. The famously steep road historically used to roll down logs, has gradually developed into shelter to the more rowdy portion of the Seattle population. Today, the area remains littered with homeless encampments, in addition to three other publicly funded camps in the city, accommodating its more than 10,000 homeless.
In 2004, Carey Fuller, a single parent who worked as a ramp agent in Seattle Airport and as a medical administrator, lost both of her jobs. A 49-year-old strong, full-figured Native American who used to hunt and tan her own hides in her youth, she has struggled to survive ever since. With the low-income jobs she later landed, she couldn’t afford housing for herself and her two daughters, and they moved into a 1981 Winnebago motorhome. A mini-stroke and several vans later, Fuller decided to anonymously tell her experience to the world on a social website that was looking for stories about homelessness:
“It isn’t easy, living as I do… I have to be careful with what I say to co-workers, friends and family. They don’t fully understand or know why I don’t invite people over or why my kids don’t have sleepovers.”
She published the story in late 2010, and it caught the attention of Mark Horvath, who was looking to promote homeless voices online. Here was a homeless mom who was articulate and had a powerful message. “That is the voice that America needs to hear,” he thought.
Horvath obtained Fuller’s email and explained the significance of amplifying her voice. Once he convinced her that she could empower herself by going online, he taught her all he knew about connecting to people. Horvath also supported her with a tablet and a phone, proverbially showing her how to fish. In return, Fuller began managing Horvath’s virtual support community We Are Visible and eventually decided to come out to the world as a “homeless mother living in the Pacific Northwest.”
Fuller, an avid storyteller, began writing her own blog, opened a Twitter account and started a Facebook page. She posted on a daily basis from the library or on her own devices, using the local McDonald’s Wi-Fi. She reached over 2,000 followers when The Huffington Post approached her to write (unpaid) about her life as a homeless parent. “It was to create awareness, so I did it,” she says.
Her first online calls for assistance in 2011 reached Rex Hohlbein’s Homeless in Seattle Facebook group, and people started donating her money via PayPal. “I think what happens on the Facebook page and other social media is that people see a story … and see a little bit of themselves at that moment,” Hohlbein tries to explain why people from all over the world, and himself personally, would send money and words of support to strangers. “We identify with these moments of joy or tragedy, and we access our empathy.”
A year and a half ago, Fuller finally managed to secure a permanent though part-time job as an Amtrak coach cleaner in downtown Seattle. She applied using her laptop and the Auburn library Wi-Fi. With the help of several PayPal donations from her Facebook and Twitter followers, she was able to pay her first rent in almost a decade.
Stepping into her crowded, two-bedroom, 875-dollar-a-month clapboard dwelling in Federal Way, in a remote area some 20 miles south of Seattle, the sense of homelessness is still haunting. Heaps of unorganized plastic bags, boxes, clothes and papers pile from the floor and over the random furniture that occupies the small space. Stuffy and dimly lit, the tiny living room serves as both a bedroom for Ariella and a storage for received donations.
Down a narrow staircase, 12-year-old Maggie is on the computer. Having missed a year of school because they couldn’t afford the gas to get her back and forth from Auburn, Maggie is now home-schooled. She waits until her mother returns from her night shifts to use the smartphone’s data plan as a hot spot. Only then can she attend her online classes. Wi-Fi access is still unaffordable.
“For young people, broadband is like the air we breathe,” James P. Steyer told the New York Times in February. His nonprofit, Common Sense Media, has been campaigning for changes in Lifeline, a 1985 federal program to bring phone services to low-income communities in the U.S. Dubbed “Obama Phones” in recent years, the program transitioned to cellphones and is expected to undergo massive reform that would include supplying smartphones and broadband service to those in need. “By the end of 2017 we would want to have measured an increase in the total number of low income households that have internet access,” says Danny Weiss, vice president of federal policy at Common Sense. He adds that it is in the country’s interest because a wired community helps grow the economy, improves people’s access to healthcare and increases their educational opportunities.
Until that happens, Maggie will continue to wait every day to use her mother’s 90 dollar a month data plan. Without it, Fuller says she would be disconnected from her friends and community. Using the internet to talk with people, keep in touch, fill out forms, find out where resources are and tell her story, all justify paying the bill in her eyes.
Fuller and her daughters have been living in the house for several months now, but their kitchenware mainly consists of camping pots. Fuller’s bed is a leaking air mattress. With her 18 dollars an hour paycheck on a 50-hour limit, it’s easy to do the math.
“Every time I’m out working, I do it with the viewpoint that if I can’t make rent — just be ready to go — because then we’ll be homeless and it could happen just like that,” she says. “There’s no way I can keep asking people for money online … cause people will get tired of giving after a while.”
Stuck in the Past
“As I’m sitting out here, freezing cold, scared, hungry & empty, all I can think of, what did I do so wrong to be in this position. Hopeless!”
“I am one of the half of all seniors in the USA and more in CA who cannot afford housing and [am] sleeping in my car in the cold, wet, windy rainy weather…”
“I am A Homeless Vet Living In MI I AM SO TIRED [of] BEING COLD AND NOT SEEN”
– A few of the thousands of tweets sent to Mark Horvath’s twitter handles, @invisiblepeople and @hardlynormal. Combined followership: 60,000.
In January, Horvath heard from a woman from San Bernardino who told him she is a homeless disabled widow with a sick grandson. Horvath wrote to his followers about her situation. Moments later, user @von_non_ suggested the address and phone number of a nearby Operation Safehouse and a link to a homeless service providers guide. Later that day, Lua James (@poptivist), a member of a large online fan-based community, offered help and a 15-dollar donation. “Outreach is in the blueprint of fandom because we’re all just strangers coming together in the name of something that we love,” James explains. She says she does have her suspicions of strangers online, but her “willingness to help somebody weighed about 15 dollars against my unwillingness to get screwed.”
Facebook and Twitter are not only affordable ways of communication, but a platform for individual, independent voices of the homeless, no longer relying on nonprofits and well-meaning groups to tell their story and find help. Horvath has been reinforcing these voices for the past eight years with a portfolio of close-up interviews of homeless people across the world. He now has over 500 videos and some 20,000 subscribers on his Youtube channel.
Horvath’s videos can literally change people’s lives. He met Adrian Cramp on a rainy summer day in London. Cramp, who grew up in foster homes and was homeless by sixteen, was “sleeping rough,” a common British term for homelessness. He was unsheltered until 21, when he made a decision to leave the street. A decade later, he was a business development manager for a merchant banking company, only to lose his job, apartment and partner during the recession. “I ended up sleeping back under the same tree I started off 12 years ago, [as if] the last 12 years had never happened,” he writes on his website.
In July 2012, when Horvath interviewed him, Cramp was selling umbrellas on the street. He confided to Horvath his dream of opening a t-shirt shop with his own designs. The video went up with a link to Cramp’s website. In Sweden, 1,100 miles away, Diana Ekenhall saw the post, followed the link, and contacted Cramp, who was staying in a homeless hostel at the time. They spent the next nine months chatting daily on Facebook. “Most [of] the time people were drunk in the hostel and kept breaking the computers,” Cramp remembers, “and when only one was left working I guarded it like my life depended on it and made sure no one damaged it, as Facebook was my only way of us talking.”
Ekenhall said she was inspired by Cramp and wanted to meet him. “I was a mess and she was stunningly beautiful,” Cramp recalls. In early March, they hung his latest painting on the violet wallpaper in their new apartment in Stockholm. Cramp’s Facebook relationship status is now “Engaged”.
Horvath, today a marketing officer for Rescue Mission Alliance in Syracuse, New York, calls his true ambition “virtual case management”: communicating online with people who otherwise have no stable, consistent contact with their community. Despite web-enabled mobile devices and public computer labs expanding to reach everyone, he believes he is the only person performing active cyber outreach to interact with the online homeless. There is, of course, no shortage of homeless advocacy groups; however, the majority of traditional nonprofits view social media as something like one-way broadcast media. They use it for marketing, donations and exposure, inviting those in need to contact them but not reaching out to ask if someone needs help.
“We’re not doing much per se on social media,” admits Juan de la Cruz, Grand Central Food Program Director at the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City. “I think some social workers still see it as a luxury rather than a need, especially for the clients who are out on the streets,” he says, “so we’re a little behind the times when it comes to that.”
What de la Cruz has been doing for the past 15 years is meeting the people on the streets. Every evening, at 7pm sharp, four white vans leave 108 East 51st Street. The cars’ doors shut almost simultaneously as the vehicles, laden with boxes of oranges, cartons of milk, loaves of bread and containers of warm soup, carry the daily Coalition’s volunteers across the boroughs. Volunteer partners Brian Venerus and Mary Miller take the downtown route. They have been participating in the food shift for the past 15 and 7 years, respectively. On the first stop, at 35th Street under FDR Drive, Miller hands out plastic bags to the men and women who form a short line behind the car, as Venerus unloads the goods, one for each.
Although it is frowned upon, he says, Asaf Eyal, an intern at the Coalition, stays in contact via social media and texting with some of his clients, many of whom are on Facebook. “It’s their way of communicating with the world,” he explains, giving an example of a woman in need who first found him on Facebook before coming to meet him at the office. “Last Friday she came to see me for the second time and already looked much better, and this is all thanks to the Facebook contact,” he says. Amongst the hundreds of homeless people he has met over the past couple of years, Eyal estimates that at least 80 percent use some form of electronic communication: email, a social media profile or just a cell phone number. The problem, he iterates, is that social services aren’t aware of the growing online homeless community and are “still stuck in a dated notion that it is not possible that these people will be on Facebook.”
Some established advocacy groups dispute the potential efficacy of social media. Urban Pathways has been helping homeless New Yorkers for over four decades. Developing an expertise in face-to-face outreach, their 2015 accomplishments include placing over 600 clients into housing. Mainly dealing with chronically homeless individuals living on the streets of New York City, it has not been their experience that most of them have access to technology. CEO and veteran social worker Fredrick Shack knows that some use computers in libraries and at their drop in centers, but says that “even in something as basic as banking or medication we find ourselves in a situation where we have to help them make those linkages to those basic services.” His organization may be connecting with clients via email, Shack says, but it is not something he is aware of.
Others are aware that their clientele use social media, but acknowledge that they are not exploring its potential. Sue Ellen Saunders, outreach program manager for Frontline Services in Cleveland, Ohio, is familiar with homeless people in her community going online. “I have had a couple of cases where people were putting a plea out [on social media] and we did reach out through that, but it’s very limited.” When asked why, she hesitates. “I’m not sure … we haven’t done it and I don’t have a reason why.”
The reason may come down to money. The idea of interaction with people who are homeless on social media is so foreign to these organizations, Mark Horvath says, that unless a funder will come in with a grant specifically targeting technology, they are unlikely to pursue it. Another reason stems from the core values of the nonprofits, where staff are usually not allowed to use cellphones or social media profiles to contact clients. Many employees legitimately have concerns about crossing boundaries with clients, and social networking is perceived as a danger zone. Meanwhile, nonprofits often dedicate their websites and social media profiles to fundraising and public education, with a strong belief that the traditional face-to-face contact with the homeless is effective and sufficient. It is an assumption that, in today’s world, merits re-examination.
Mobiles for All
“I had been homeless forever.”
Sylvia Martin turned 60 a few days before our January meeting in a San Jose nonprofit office. She openly speaks of her youth in rural Indiana. “I ran away from a very abusive home life when I was 16 years old. I did not realize how much it impacted me, because I simply traded the beating that my father gave me for the beatings of domestic violence. I don’t think I was gone six months before I was raped the first time, and that just started a spiral. In and out of jail, in and out of relationships.”
For many decades, and like many other abuse victims, Martin blamed herself. She escaped to California and lived on and off the streets until she found spiritual sanctuary in yoga and psychiatric therapy. All the while, she refused to be isolated from society. Martin bought her first laptop in the early 1990s, using her small monthly mental health stipend from the government. “I realized at the time that there was something about having this laptop that I could connect to people,” she remembers. But staying connected wasn’t easy, with limited access to the internet and devices stolen on a regular basis, she says.
Eighteen months ago, Martin was introduced to MobileforAll, a project designed to connect the homeless to their community organizations and beyond. She received a new smartphone as part of the program, and knew exactly what to do with it. “I use my phone as it was intended — to connect me to jobs or to housing. That’s how I found out that there’s housing,” she says. Today Martin lives in a tiny unit in a supportive housing complex in Mountain View. She pays a third of her income for rent, receives on-site social support and looks forward to the day when she can move on.
Martin keeps her phone wrapped in a Ziploc bag inside her waist pouch. She says it got her housed, but also helps her stay in touch with her case manager, find her way around town and locate the closest Starbucks with open Wi-Fi. Today, Martin is one of some 80 Bay Area residents who use a new, donated MobileforAll smartphone.
On a bright Monday morning in San Francisco’s Market Street, a few short blocks from the seedy Tenderloin neighborhood, Twitter’s “Neighbors Nest” opens its doors. Twitter funds the homey social center and hosts community activities in it. Located right across from the company’s famous headquarters, the “Nest” welcomes a group of eleven people. Well-dressed, finger nails polished, brand new smartphones in their hands, it’s impossible to tell the entire group is, in fact, homeless. Some with baby trolleys and young children, they have arrived for the monthly MobileforAll workshop. A team of mentors is already in tow, prepared to help them with technical phone-related issues ranging from how to use Wi-Fi to setting up an email app.
As they scatter across the room, awaiting their turn in the unofficial customer service line, Allan Baez, MobileforAll initiator and program manager, is giving final instructions to his crew. A geologist from Costa Rica, Baez came to the U.S. five years ago to study floods vulnerability in the central valley of California. He discovered it was the poor and the homeless who were most susceptible when a natural disaster occurs. Baez realized there was no viable data on their exact location and no way of communicating with them in cases of emergency, so he decided to join Community Technology Alliance (CTA), a nonprofit focused on bridging homelessness and technology.
In 2013, CTA conducted a survey in the Santa Clara area, where they counted over 28,000 homeless people. The study revealed that homeless and very low-income individuals were adopting mobile phones in large numbers. The problem was access to service, which was not affordable, as people were spending up to 15 percent of their annual income on cellphone bills. Many were not able to maintain payment and got disconnected, losing their number in crucial times when potential employers would call back. Baez designed a business model that would try to keep them connected: an affordable and reliable service. In 2014, MobileforAll partnered with Sparrow, a socially motivated mobile operator that provides both the network and a cheap phone plan to help keep their clients connected.
The program has thus far distributed two hundred of the one thousand Nexus 5 cellphones donated by Google. Twitter covers service costs for the first six months, after which clients pay 30 dollars a month for a cellular and data plan. If they have trouble with payments, Sparrow holds on to the phone numbers for an extra six months, while trying to help individuals avoid disconnection by collaborating with local case management partners.
“This is a tool, not a solution, but the impact we have seen is a psychological one,” Baez says. “It makes people feel part of the society. Once they have the good-looking phone Google gave us, they connect to Facebook and suddenly everyone is the same — posting pictures and comments. If they chose so, nobody can know they’re homeless.” The company currently measures success by examining how frequently the phone is helping case managers address their clients’ needs. Baez believes a smartphone would eventually allow clients to request help more efficiently.
One of Twitter’s current goals is to grow deeper roots in the local community and address social needs. This is part of a growing trend, in which tech companies look for a social impact in their own backyard, whether as a PR strategy or as part of the organizations’ core values. Twitter decided to focus on families. It provides a learning center where parents can access technology while their young children have a safe and entertaining place to stay.
That Monday, two-year old Amanda Parrish colors ice-cream cones with Emily, a volunteer from Compass Family Services (partners in the “Neighbors Nest” program), while her parents are learning about their new phones in the next room. Dave Parrish has been living with his wife and daughter in and out of hotels since they left their apartment in late October. Following an injury, Parrish lost his limo driver job, and the family had moved to a San Francisco family shelter by the end of 2015. When he tried to show cartoon videos on Youtube to Amanda, he discovered the Wi-Fi in the shelter wasn’t working. “I don’t know how you do it with a two-year old,” Chuck Jagoda, a MobileforAll mentor and former homeless tells Parrish, as he teaches him to use messenger and texting apps, and how to add new contacts to his phone. “Just remember homelessness is temporary, and when you’ll move into your own apartment, you’ll have Wi-Fi,” Jagoda reassures him.
MoblieforAll’s greatest challenge is sustainability, with a majority of the phones — some 60–75 percent — broken, lost or stolen. The organization is currently working on solutions, such as an alerting device to warn the owner if the phone leaves a certain range. This, of course, won’t be effective if the client is actively selling the smartphone — a risk Baez is willing to take as part of the group’s “learning curve.”
Also taking the risk are a few new projects like the Los Angeles-based Human IT. The group literally adopts the “one man’s trash” trope by collecting unwanted or inoperative devices, refurbishing and delivering them to people in need. A week into the launch of a February 2016 pilot with the local nonprofit My Friend’s Place, three of the ten phones distributed to homeless youth were either broken or gone. This rate is predictable, “given the chaos of the street,” the program’s director Erin Casey says, adding that success will be measured based on how the phones will eventually assist with accomplishing case management goals. Meanwhile in Washington D.C., a yearlong program aimed at connecting LGBT homeless youth resulted in 80 percent of the participants losing or breaking their phones, or simply dropping out of the program and disappearing.
The risk is sometimes even greater than a damaged device. In 2011, Karin M. Eyrich-Garg of Temple University’s School of Social Work surveyed a small group of homeless individuals in Philadelphia to determine internet access. She later learned that one of them was killed in a fight over his smartphone. Eyrich-Garg worries now about the unintended consequences of giving out mobile devices. “Some researchers want to give people smartphones [as part of a study], but if it’s dangerous and people want to fight for it — and you have very few possessions and so people would fight for it — it might endanger their life,” she says. “Some might call me maternal, but I’m very concerned about the ethics of what we’re doing.”
Mark Horvath’s experience, however, brought him to a different conclusion. When he started living on the streets of Hollywood, he gave an older homeless woman a blanket. The next day, he recalls, the blanket was gone and she had a black eye. His point being — it’s not the shiny object, it’s homelessness. “People steal the shower curtains from shelters because it’s plastic and they go and make tents out of them,” he argues, “so should we not have shower curtains?”
The Tech Revolution
In 2010, Mark Horvath launched a homeless-empowering website called We Are Visible, aimed at teaching basic online tools and giving a voice to otherwise unheard individuals. He saw it as a first step in building an online homeless community that would provide a support system as well as a springboard out of homelessness.
Six years in, the project has faded into cyber-oblivion. It died, Horvath says, because it was ahead of its time, and might still be. Facebook encourages its users to share photos, videos and posts about their private lives, but many felt uncomfortable revealing their homelessness. Today, hundreds of homeless groups exist on Facebook, with thousands of followers, as people begin to realize there are so many more people out there who are in a similar situation. Social services, however, have not made it that far yet.
“People, especially service providers, thought my ideas of using social media for peer support and what I coined as ‘virtual case management’ were crazy. But I knew then, and I know now, they work,” Horvath says. A one-man platform of virtual homeless support, he steadily continues to find those in need online and answer the constant stream of distress messages that reach him. “I try and point [them] in the right direction, but a person trained to help … could make a difference,” he says.
With automated tools to follow keyword trends on social media, Horvath’s virtual case management could also play an important role in preventing evictions and providing tangible social integration to people who are in the process of getting housed. Service providers can address individuals who are seeking help online faster and on a more frequent basis. Initial online communication could assist a case manager to identify relevant resources of stability such as job offers, childcare services and donated clothes centers. However, most agencies are sticking to traditional models of outreach and fail to add online case management to their stack of services, whether due to lack of funding, lack of knowledge or lack of initiative. Horvath, who is also part of the nonprofit system, reflects that the homeless services sector don’t have the time or energy to look to the future because they are presently overextended.
He does, however, see a future for his dream. His work planted the seeds for others, as in the case of Luc Tanja, a Dutch street pastor who founded StraatVogels, or Street Birds, a Twitter community where homeless people provide “a unique insight into life on the streets.” Tanja and his team befriend them on Facebook and maintain weekly contact, while initiating group activities and one-on-one interactions on the streets of Amsterdam.
While technology both empowers and contributes to potential risks, it is an unstoppable force. Today, no one has the ability to prevent anyone else from participating in the online community. Mobile phones have democratized technology and can bring local service providers closer to their users. New pants or a sandwich may help people momentarily, but when he got a phone, one of the first apps James Christian Jr. downloaded allowed him to make free phone calls to his case worker. “A ham sandwich cannot do that!” Horvath cries. A smartphone, then, becomes the 21st century version of a fishing rod.
Today, a wide variety of services and activities has shifted online, and not taking part in the cyber world virtually constitutes non-existence. As many of us can attest, smartphones are a piece of technology we cannot live without. Expecting people in poverty not to have the tools to find work, to fall in love, to connect to relatives and to look for support, is sentencing them to deprivation for life and denying them any chance of rehabilitation. For people experiencing homelessness, the imperative of being connected is a matter of both survival and belonging. And in 2016, public access is not enough. A device to allow continuous, round-the-clock connectivity — a cell phone with an online connection — is necessary to allow him or her to be mobile, not tied to a specific location or dependent on the limited access shelters and libraries provide today.
It is clear that current strategies to fight homelessness are failing, as numbers of homeless families, adults and teenagers are skyrocketing. The numerous efforts to provide temporary — and often unsafe — shelter, give out food and clothes and go out on street visits, can now be joined by a stronger force, a network that is connecting anyone and everywhere, no matter race, gender, age or income. “I don’t think it’s really a technology thing, but a human thing,” Horvath says. “Whether it’s the written word, or the spoken word, or whether it’s tapping with our thumbs on a phone. It’s a human experience of how we’re communicating.”