In 2008 I lost everything. By spring, 2009 I had to sell my house. I was penniless and couch surfing with friends. JavaScript turned that all around. Fast forward to 2010, I had a great job, and I was commuting through downtown San Francisco. One day I literally tripped over a homeless man who was trying to sleep on a cardboard box in the middle of the sidewalk. The conditions that homeless people are forced to endure are shocking. They should be shocking. We should be outraged.

How did we let this happen? How is it that we can send a rover to Mars, but we can’t afford basic dignity and respect for the people who need it the most? How is it that our brilliant solution to this problem is to put spikes in doorways to discourage people from laying down?

Ever since I personally faced the problem of finding shelter with no income, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we might solve the problem for everybody. That’s what programmers do best: identify a common problem and figure out how to solve the problem more generally.

You might think it’s impossible to solve a problem like homelessness. It’s so overwhelming! But you’d be wrong. In the US, we’re in the middle of a nation-wide initiative to end homelessness for good.

Did you know it costs more money to let somebody sleep on the street than it costs to give them homes for free? The chronically homeless are hyper users of social services. They’re much more likely to require ambulance rides than people with homes, and since a homeless person typically doesn’t have health insurance, and they can’t pay a dime out of pocket, taxpayers foot the bill. In other words, we’re already giving each of them anywhere from $20 thousand to $3 Million every year for being homeless. Why not give them a lot more and spend a lot less money?

That’s right. We, the brilliant taxpayers of America, actually pay potentially millions of dollars per year to keep one person on the street. Seriously! We pay out of our collective pocket to keep people down. That’s the choice we make when we allow our government to make cheap investments in homeless services. It’s neglect. It’s that simple. And we’re all guilty of it.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

A few years ago, local governments across the states began to believe that it’s actually possible to end homelessness almost entirely. Some of them are having surprising success. For example, Salt Lake City, Utah had roughly 3,000 chronically homeless residents a few years ago. Now there are about 400.

How did they do that? They give away housing. Good housing that people actually want to live in. There are shelters still, but there’s a high turnover. People stay there just long enough to make arrangements for a new home, and that wait is measured in days or weeks, not months or years.

Salt Lake City gets people off the streets quickly and into assisted living arrangements where they’re assigned caseworkers who help people find the services they need to become self-sufficient. And it’s working. Nationally, taxpayers save about $1.3 Billion by funding assisted housing programs.

But assisted housing is only the first step. To really claim success, we need to help the homeless stand on their own feet. Contrary to the stereotypes, that’s something that most of them genuinely want to do.

The next step is to find a job, and to do that, you need training, which brings me back to JavaScript.

When I first learned and fell in love with JavaScript in the 90's, few people took it very seriously. Nobody guessed it would play the critical role it plays today. In case you’re not aware, most of the software applications we use and take for granted now are built with JavaScript. It powers Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, PayPal, and millions of other services.

Because JavaScript is the only programming language supported by every modern browser, the entire web is dependent on it, making it the most widely used programming language in the world — and it’s still growing faster than any other programming language. There’s just one problem: There aren’t enough JavaScript developers to keep up with demand.

Demand for software developers is so high that most of the top companies have an always hiring policy for developers; they hire as quickly as they can find qualified candidates, and when that’s not fast enough, they actively recruit candidates from other countries or outsource work to India.

So we’re paying money to keep people on the streets and then going out of our way to give some of the best paying jobs in the world to foreign citizens. Insanity.

Why is it national news when one homeless man learns to code? We should have thousands of homeless people training for high paying jobs every day. This situation is intolerable.

I used to say to myself, “you can’t help everybody” a dozen times a day as I used San Francisco’s subway system that swarms with people pleading for help.

I was wrong. You can help everybody. Any of us can. In cities across the country there are programs supplying free housing to the homeless. Find the one nearest to you and donate some money there, instead. Quality housing first programs are our best chance of ending this for good.

I’m donating in a different way. A few years ago I started getting tasked with vetting candidates for job openings. That’s when I realized the magnitude of the skills gap problem and decided to do something about it. I wrote a book to teach developers how to use JavaScript for application development.

The book is available online, free of charge, but the book isn’t enough. It requires too much prior knowledge to be useful to the homeless community.

With that in mind, I’m building a series of online courses called “Learn JavaScript with Eric Elliott”. They will target beginners and experts alike and give students a big leg up. Our Kickstarter campaign raised 250% of our goal. We’re in the process of producing the courses and fulfilling orders right now.

As with the book, the courses will be available at no cost to the homeless. Of course, that doesn’t do any good if nobody knows about it, so we’re reaching out proactively and partnering with the heroes and champions of the end homelessness movement.

We’re going to make sure that job training programs know that this option is available to their users. My goal is to enroll hundreds of students per year in the program for free.

If you want to help, you can purchase a course bundle scholarship (you can give them as gifts or redeem it yourself — if you’re not sure who to give it to, we can refer you to a school or training program).

Another great way to help is to share this article with your friends.

Update: We did it! 250% Funded on Kickstarter!

…But the work is far from complete. We raised $25,000 including sponsorship in July 2014 to pay for course content creation. We promised to open up the courses in December.

Our first round of funding covered the cost of course content creation, and since we exceeded our goal, we expanded the plan to create two additional courses.

Now we’re moving into the second phase: Early course deployment for the first course (October), and student recruitment for the first course pilot program. For this second phase, we need to raise $10,000.

How we’ll use the money

Current online course software doesn’t work as well as it could to present interactive programming lessons complete with videos, text, and self-grading exercises.

We want to build a specialized site so that we can deliver the best learning experience possible to our students.

We’re launching the first course in October. We want to set aside some funding to help spread the word and test the course with real students. Early student feedback will help us create a better learning experience for the official launch in December.

We Need a JSHomes website that we can use to coordinate the activities that support the free training for those in the housing-first community.

We’re launching a scholarship program that allows anybody to purchase transferable course scholarships that they can grant to individual students or participating schools. With the scholarship program in place, people don’t have to be homeless to get help from JSHomes. We’ll help match up scholarship donors with the right recipients, too.

Click to Contribute

The Game Plan

1. July 2014: Plan course outlines and raise $7.5k to pay for the course production costs. This covers the costs of course materials, video recording, editing, and graphic design. Thanks to your help, we raised $25,000 and expanded our goal to create two additional courses.

2. September — November 2014: Launch the first course, and begin course website design and production. This is where we are today. We’ve produced some great course materials, and it’s time bring the first course to the public. We also need to build a great website where students can log in and access all their course materials.

3. December — March — Multiple course deployments & .org accounts. We plan to deploy more courses and expand website capabilities so that organizations can subscribe. This is when we’ll launch the pilot job training program to serve the homeless communities.

You Can Help!

1. Make a donation — All course packages are transferable scholarships anybody can use to learn JavaScript. You can gift the scholarship to schools in your local community, or we can donate the scholarships to a training program for you.
2. Purchase a scholarship and redeem it for yourself! Learn valuable skills and help a great cause at the same time!
3. Spread the word. We need your help. Post a link to this program on social media with the hashtag #jshomes. Tell your friends why you believe in it, and what helping means to you. Tweet this page!

If you would like to volunteer, follow @JS_Cheerleader on Twitter (this is important, or she won’t be able to respond) and send the following tweet:

> @JS_Cheerleader I want to volunteer to fight poverty. http://bit.ly/jshomes #jshomes

If you have already volunteered, but you haven’t heard from us yet, don’t worry. We got the message. We’re overwhelmed and very grateful for the volume of support that’s being offered, but it’s taking us some time to catch up.

Even with so many people reaching out a helping hand, there is still much more to do. We can use every volunteer we can get! If you haven’t heard back from us yet, you can start by sharing your favorite post from The Backer Army Collection on Medium.

In the meantime, volunteers can help by sharing these tweet worthy facts:

• Fighting poverty with code: http://bit.ly/jshomes http://bit.ly/ljsCourses #jshomes
• Giving homeless people free homes saves US taxpayers $1.3B / year http://bit.ly/jshomes #jshomes
• One out of 50 children or 1.5 million children in America will be homeless each year. http://bit.ly/jshomes #jshomes
• As many as 3.5 million people experience homelessness in a given year. http://bit.ly/jshomes #jshomes
• The average salary for a JavaScript developer in the United States is $93,000. http://bit.ly/jshomes #jshomes
• People experience homelessness because they can’t find housing they can afford. http://bit.ly/jshomes #jshomes
• The number of homeless kids increased by 10 percent in the 2012–13 school year. http://bit.ly/jshomes #jshomes
• Gifts for the homeless: Clothing, socks, soap, grooming supplies, deodorant, yoga mats, food gift cards. http://bit.ly/jshomes
• Everything you think you know about panhandlers is wrong. http://bit.ly/jshomes #jshomes
• You can learn to code well enough to find a job in as little as five months. http://bit.ly/jshomes #jshomes

In the next chapter, you’ll learn how my childhood best friend (with a little help from Michael Jordan) gave me the courage to confront and conquer impossible challenges.

If you want to follow all of these chapters as they become available, subscribe to The Backer Army collection on Medium and follow @TheBackerArmy on Twitter.