Certification for Panhandlers
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
When you walk out of Grand Central Station, you are immediately greeted by panhandlers with heart-wrenching stories on signs and sympathetic facial expressions. They are often men claiming to be veterans or women claiming to be abused and pregnant. On the streets of Paris, the panhandlers are usually families, including small kids, purporting to be refugees, sitting on blankets, their belongings near at hand. It’s a worldwide problem.
Many passersby would give generously if they knew these stories were real. But how can you tell what’s true and what’s fiction? Maybe you give loose change on the spur of the moment. But there’s always the lingering doubt — are you being suckered or could this be a situation like in Slumdog Millionaire, Oliver Twist, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where beggars are exploited, and sometimes children are deliberately mutilated to make them look more pathetic.
I’m a bit of a Dagwood, the cartoon character who frequently said There ought to be a law. I can’t help but think of what might be done to change things for the better.
Might the omnipresence of cellphones help? Imagine a program for certifying panhandlers, perhaps run by homeless shelters, and sponsored by corporations. When the administrators are convinced that someone is truly in need, that person is assigned a QR code which he or she can display. With a cellphone app, a passerby can scan that code and see a profile of this person and what he or she needs and why, and what he or she has already collected toward that goal. Passerby could immediately make donations to the account of that particular panhandler. And sponsoring corporations could choose to match donations up to some preset limit. The money and/or credits could be collected by the panhandlers at the same shelters that do the certification.
