It was waiting for me as I walked to my office door at the Mission this morning: a lottery ticket. Right there on the concrete landing; all bright and shiny.
Don’t get too excited. It was just a used scratch ticket. Someone had played the odds and lost, pure and simple.
Yet I couldn’t help but think about the odds in the everyday lives of the people we serve. What are the odds that someone becomes homeless, anyway? According to a trusted report on homelessness in America, over the course of a year the estimated odds of experiencing homelessness are presently about
- · 1 in 194 for the general population,
- · 1 in 29 for people with incomes at or below the poverty level,
- · 1 in 10 for veterans living in poverty,
- · 1 in 12 for people living with friends or relatives due to economic need,
- · 1 in 13 for a person discharged from incarceration, and
- · 1 in 11 for youth aged out of foster care.[i]
I don’t pretend to know how those figures strike you. They startle me. Look at them: about a 10% chance of being homeless this year if you’re freshly out of jail or foster care, or if you’re living with friends or relatives because of money, or if you’re a veteran living at or below the poverty line. You have a tad more than a 3% chance of being homeless if your income is at or below the poverty level.
(And just so you know, your odds are significantly better for becoming homeless from the general population [1 in 194] than for winning just $21 from playing a Colorado state scratch ticket [1 in 300].[ii] Just sayin’.)
Someone had thrown the ticket down in frustration or resignation or anger (maybe) for the loss of hope they’d once held in the ticket. I just hoped that it wasn’t someone who was homeless or at-risk. That feeling of loss, that stinging hurt of once having possibilities and now having empty hands, is all too common for our neighbors who come here for help. A losing scratch ticket likely would add insult to injury. But they’d already feel that the odds were stacked against them, wouldn’t they?
That’s why the roles we play as friends of the homeless matter. You matter because whether you encounter a homeless person only on occasion, or you meet new faces from the homeless in your community every day, you become a vendor of hope. Few feel the impact of hope (or the lack thereof) as keenly as those who consistently face homelessness.
Our task is to help them beat the odds against them.
Chances are we have better odds of doing that than in winning the lottery, at least.
[i] The Homelessness Research Institute. The State of Homelessness in America 2012, National Alliance to End Homelessness, January 2012, 38-39.
Hope vendors...I like that...I want to be that...
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