How Services Get Found

When I was homeless, the state of the art for disseminating information to the homeless was paper handouts and word of mouth. It was nearly impossible to find what I needed by looking stuff up on the internet. 

I doubt this has changed much and I doubt it will. Advertising your wealth of local homeless services online is a wonderful attractive nuisance, incredibly hard to actually keep up to date AND you should really be trying to reduce the incidence of homelessness anyway rather than inadvertently growing the problem by focusing specifically on helping the homeless.

My advice: Advertise your new Two Towers projects and new Missing Middle Housing developments. Keep your homeless services on the down low.

Anyway, when I was homeless and looking for services, the process went like this: You call 211 or ask a librarian or someone else for information, then go to the first homeless services place and you let them know what you need, like more food resources or new ID, and they will probably give you a paper handout listing what they know of in the area. Then you start calling or going to the places listed.

The list may not be comprehensive and information on it may not be accurate. The address for a thing may be wrong or the date and time may have changed since this list was put together, etc.

Also, sometimes churches are doing things like a weekly free meal that may not be on the list at whatever organization you went to. There can be lots of little things out there that aren't really listed anywhere and you wind up finding out about them by participating in some other free meal or something like that.

So you should view the list as a place to start. If you run through everything on the list and still haven't got what you need, that may not mean you are out of options. The thing you need may still exist, but, if so, it will take some digging to turn it up.

Related: Finding the Services You Need

Footnote 

Originally published elsewhere on September 30, 2018. Updated slightly.