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About / The Plan
My name is Chris. I’ve been homeless since 2007. I’m 47 years old and I need your help. Read on.
There are no government resources available to deal with chronic homelessness. No charities exist providing the kind of help homeless people like me need. We have been left behind.
Asking for your help is my only option.
Homelessness is a simple problem. Absence of funding, lack of resources — these characteristics define homelessness. To be sure, the problems surrounding homelessness are complex. Yet it is lack of resources, ultimately, which creates the problem of homelessness itself. Frame the reality of my life in those terms and you’ll better understand why your help is essential to a successful future beyond homelessness.
My goal, ultimately, is to use my experience homeless to bring change to the way the problem is addressed. At a deep level, the challenges are systemic, the obstacles institutional. Anyone can become homeless. Many don’t make it back. Change is possible.
My plan is to raise enough money to support me in housing for one year. During that time, I’ll work. I will apply as a mature student to York University (read the letter of enquiry I wrote here), to study ‘Business and Society,’ with the aim of establishing a new non-profit organization for advocacy in homelessness policy.
My plan is anchored by the GoFundMe I’ve started, here.
The specific numbers I’ve based my fundraising goal on can be found here, in the blog post titled, ‘Numbers / Cost of Living.’
(The numbers are laid out as simply as possible. A spreadsheet would probably be easier for some to access, I just don’t have the skill [ or time to acquire the skill ] to present a simple set of numbers in that way.)
About / Bio
Fully one third of my life has been spent trapped in homelessness.
You’ll already know a little about me. Chances are, you’ve arrived here motivated by morbid curiosity. People rarely admit it publicly, but they love a disaster. Maybe it’s nothing so serious as a flaw in human nature. Call it a common trait. I mean, without it, we wouldn’t have ‘reality’ TV. At any rate, let’s see if we can’t turn your curiosity into something helpful.
About me? I’m not entirely sure how to do this. What are the pertinent facts? Do I tell you that I was abused as a child? Do I tell you I’ve never graduated high school? That I thought I would be dead by the age of twenty three? Want to hear about that time I had cancer? Or being arrested as a sex criminal by Toronto Police, in their act of joke-based harassment? What about my interest in gardening? My hobbies? Favourite colour?
Much of this kind of thing is history for me, alien, in the past. Muted by homelessness my curiosities and passing interests have become immobile, frozen in time.
Just like you, I know I am more than what I do, more than what others see me as. Homelessness destroys a person’s future, their past, and their identity. Fourteen years on, my personal history is but a set of details. My homelessness has become who I am. I need your help to change that.
I need you to act now. Donate, and tell your friends.