The city of Vancouver is using an ingenious initiative to beautify their streets and help the homeless population in one fell swoop. Vancouver is hiring their homeless to clean up the city’s streets with the help of seven non-profit organizations. Among these organizations are United We Can, The Kettle Friendship Society’s SEED Employment Program, and Family Services of Greater Vancouver’s Street Youth Job Action.
The job, which serves to complement the work of city services, entails cleaning up litter on foot using brooms, shovels, and wheeled garbage carts. In 2018 alone, this program resulted in 55, 000 hours of work for individuals who face significant barriers to obtaining work. 14, 800 bags of litter and 72, 200 needles were collected from 400 blocks around Vancouver. It’s a win for both parties — the homeless are able to earn an income and potentially move out of homeless shelters, and surrounding neighbourhoods are kept clean.
When seeking gainful employment, those experiencing homelessness face a number of challenges. The most obvious hurdle is not having a permanent home. Individuals may therefore not have an address to put on a resume, a phone number to list for call backs, or even a place to recover from a hard day’s work. Furthermore, emotional instability due to trauma experienced over the course of their lives may impair required social skills and hinder their ability to apply for jobs..
As a result, such a program provides a meaningful, low-barrier job opportunity to the city’s homeless population.
Earning an income not only helps the homeless financially. It also allows them to better reintegrate into their communities, as they can be connected with full time jobs, education, or rehabilitation services. Due to the isolation that tends to come with their situations, many homeless individuals lack soft skills, including self-confidence, self-awareness, and organizational skills that are generally acquired with more structured schedules. A job, therefore, provides the opportunity to interact with others, be it employers, colleagues, or customers.
Participants of similar programs have said that the work is almost therapeutic and they no longer feel irrelevant, which boosts their self esteem. Furthermore, these programs have served as an avenue for participants to become contributing members of society, which is an excellent example of social sustainability —when people actively develop measures to maintain a healthy community and allow subsequent generations to preserve and improve their environments. When developing these social sustainability, factors taken into consideration include equity, diversity, social cohesion, and quality of life. Ultimately, these processes should be available to members of all ages and backgrounds, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, to ensure that they feel connected to one another and have their most basic needs met. Through providing the homeless, one of the most vulnerable populations, with a source of income, communities are one step closer to becoming part of the solution.
This type of program is not unique to Vancouver, however, with cities across the United States taking advantage of similar programs to provide hundreds of jobs to the homeless. In Denver, the Day Works program paid homeless people to do public service work beyond just picking up trash, including mulching flower beds and partaking in clerical work at the library. A year later, 110 of those that participated found long-term work as a result. In Canada, Winnipeg operates a similar program where the homeless are hired to clean up trash through the Siloam Mission not-profit organization. This program is so successful that it fills up nearly every day; those who don’t get a paid spot even end up volunteering because it is a productive way to spend their day. In Yellowknife, a program called Common Ground hires the homeless to clean up properties and shovel snow.
All of this goes to show that the homeless population are just as eager as anyone else to contribute and give their lives meaning. Turning a blind eye to the homeless populations in our own cities will not solve the issue. In Toronto, for instance, there are over 9000 homeless people on any given night. A program that provides job opportunities to these individuals has the potential to aid the homeless population immensely. Ultimately, it will offer them a chance to overcome barriers and work towards leading the lives they want to live.
By Azizia Wahedi
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