Homelessness Awareness
at Woman's World
It's a grey night,
clouds roll in.
It's cold.
Yet in your home,
you are safe.
You fail to notice the storm.
You fail to feel the frigid night air.
You fail to notice.
Your all to consumed with your warm life.
Your work.
Your Family.
Your Home.
On this grey night,
the family hovering,
in the tiny damp corner,
the baby wet,
the mother coughing,
the father distraught.
Unemployment hit.
welfare reform hit.
The cold hits hardest.
are you going to notice?
author:
Tina Bapp
Dedicated to the Awareness of Homelessness
Children, Families Facts!
How Many are Homeless?
Helping the Homeless
Why are they homeless?
Links and Shelter Resources
Faces of The Homeless,
Can we really clearly define the face, the look? Many American Families live day to day, any one of them could join the ranks of homelessness at anytime.
Your Family, My Family
Month to Month Families,
Those living week to week, month to month
scraping by to pay the rent, mortgage.
Homelessness is a serious epidemic,
and it doesnt discriminate!
It's REAL People
Really trying to survive.
Photo by John Decker
Photo Essay: Homeless
I could never imagine how the cold air
might have felt to the homeless man.
it was relentless in its attack to numb me all over.
He makes a living,
by picking up our trash.
He collects soda cans to afford cigarettes,
and coffee.
He said this would get him by.
Until he gets to the shelter.
UnKnown
Some Common Mistakes Americans Think when thinking homeless
Not all Homeless are Substance Dependent
Not all Homeless are illiterate
In fact, amazing enough, many homeless spend endless hours in the library, utilizing their public computers to access the web.
Many Homeless are women and children
Homeless have even demonstrated intellectual resources by creating "street newspapers"
For 1987, the most current year for which estimates of the size of the national homeless population are available, the population was estimated to be between 250,000 and 350,000.
The major causes of homelessness are poverty, unequal access to housing, inequality in the labor market, family disruption and health issues
12% of the US homeless population is composed of children under the age of 18
About 17% of all homeless persons receive income from handouts
30 to 50% of the homeless population face mental health issues
"Homelessness, surely, is an obvious state of deprivation where certain people do not have the basic requirements of a shelter. They live on the streets with the most basic belongings and almost no social ties to the wider society" - Brian Cooper
This poem, written by a homeless woman, along with other collections of her poems, is about to be published.
See her work, here:
Homeless Work
(pages by the homeless)
I Will Never Be Homeless
I will never be homeless,
It won't happen to me.
I'm doing so well, don't you see?
I have a good job, a nice house and a car,
I have everything I need to go far.
I am not like those Welfare bums,
To whom prosperity never comes.
You know, the ones who don't want to work,
Any kind of physical labour, they shirk.
All they want to do is drink,
Some are not clean, and they stink.
Then, I see a man, lying in the street,
A tattered coat around him and no shoes on his feet.
But, I sense that something is wrong,
That somehow, this man does not belong.
So, I decide to stop to say hello,
And ask him why he fell so low.
He once worked on a street called Bay,
Making good money every day.
Then, one day his job was gone.
He was told, "just go on home."
He soon just didn't care,
His purpose in life no longer there.
He lost his family, his home, and his car.
In just a few months, he fell so far.
So here he was, on the street,
With a tattered coat around him and no shoes on his feet.
Then I saw the lines on his face and the pain in his eyes,
I will never be homeless, will I?
Author: Bonnie Briggs
womansworldlove@aol.com
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