A while ago I received an email from my cell service provider asking me to support National Youth Homelessness Awareness Day on November 17th. It was a lovely e-mail, filled with heart-stirring sentiments and eye-catching graphics. It spoke of a petition to sign, volunteering opportunities to explore, and, best of all, gave instructions on how to send a text message that would donate five dollars to the cause, thereby soothing guilt without actually inconveniencing the giver in any way.
Having volunteered for a non-profit organization, I am aware of how carelessly donated funds can be channeled to causes and beneficiaries the donator had no desire to support, and as a result, I am a giver who doesn’t mind being inconvenienced. Before I dumped any of my hard-earned into National Youth Homelessness Awareness Day, I intended to find out what, exactly, I’d be getting for my five dollars.
I clicked on the link in the email and it sent me to a website containing the same graphics, an expanded version of the inspirational text and several links. Curious about the petition, I clicked on the big red button encouraging me to SIGN NOW! A drop down box appeared, telling me the petition was in support of Motion 504 and giving me another big red button that said SIGN NOW! Most people are annoyed by this kind of nuisance clicking, and I’m no exception, but I persevered because I wanted to find out what Motion 504 was about. A pop-up box appeared giving me the opportunity to enter my name, city and e-mail address, request that I be kept informed on something called Re*generation, and, at the very bottom, the words:
“I support the RE*Generation and believe we all need to work together to raise awareness for the issue of …”
The last line of the sentence was obscured by a poorly coded <div> on the home page that floated on top of the pop up window. There was no indication of what Motion 504 or Re*generation were, nor any hint about who the petition would be addressed to.
Now, I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I’m going to sign something if I don’t know what it says or who will read it. I couldn’t close the petition window and ended up having to shut down my browser. When I restarted it, I did some research on Motion 504. It turned out to be a bill presented to the House of Commons, “based on an in-depth investigation into youth homelessness in Canada”, for the creation of “an official National Youth Homelessness Awareness Day” to “raise awareness of the youth homelessness issue in Canada and help get Canadians more involved in making a difference”.
Seriously? This is the best recommendation that came out of an “in-depth”, and probably ludicrously expensive, investigation? The government got ripped off. And why only homeless youth? Is our government practicing age discrimination? I happen to know, because I go outside occasionally, that homeless people come in all ages. A person would have to be blind not to see them hanging around the entrances of shelters, panhandling in doorways, pushing their purloined shopping carts along the sidewalk and digging in trash cans for empty beer bottles. Unless Canadians never go downtown, they’re well aware there’s a homelessness issue.
Grateful that I hadn’t signed the petition, I returned to the cell provider’s website to find out what, hopefully more useful, plans they had for my five dollar donation.
First, there was a commitment to supplement the first fifty thousand donated dollars with a matching amount from the company. Excellent! One hundred thousand dollars for the cause! This would certainly help a few hundred homeless people.
Then, there was an invitation for Torontonians and Vancouverites to attend rallies on November 17th. Torontonians would have the opportunity to donate hygiene kits in exchange for a delicious hot chocolate. Vancouverites would have the opportunity to make a donation so homeless youth could get the delicious hot chocolate. I preferred to see my five dollars used to create something a little more permanent than a tube of tooth paste or a non-nutritious drink and moved on down the webpage.
There, I learned that the cell phone company supports two organizations:
1) A Toronto based bicycle courier firm who hire homeless youth couriers. In 2008, they reported an average of ten ‘targeted employees’ on staff. It’s a worthy effort, and I’d be happy to contribute to its continuation – except they don’t need any money. They are a profitable business and employ homeless people the same way they employ rest of their minimum wage couriers.
2) Another Toronto based training facility that teaches printing skills to homeless youth. They are funded by donations and by the sale of special order greeting cards. Their website is colorful and upbeat, with many, surprisingly erudite, testimonials from former students, a conspicuous DONATE button on every page and a few endearingly broken links, notably the one to the Training for Youth page. It’s another worthy effort, but given that it’s been open since 2002, and reports only 100 students trained in its three month courses, an approximate average of four student’s per semester, I get the sense they are more committed to collecting donations than they are to the actual training.
Further down the page, I came to a humongous list showing the names and locations of people who have texted in their five dollar contributions. Some of them were from Toronto and Vancouver, more from other places in Canada, where the residents, presumably living in communities too small to discard enough beer bottles to support a homeless population, are unaware of the issue. A surprising number of Americans contributed, and an even more surprising number of contributors - as in surprising that there’s even one – texted in from places like Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Sinagpore, the Netherlands, and New South Wales (which, for my geographically challenged readers, is in Australia). Who knew the plight of 65,000 homeless teenagers in Canada was a matter of international concern? Canada may be a small country, but we’re really giving those millions of pavement dwellers in India some serious competition.
At the end of all this research, as near as I could tell, my five dollars would have:
1) bought hot chocolate to encourage further donations in Toronto or Vancouver
2) funded a seriously inefficient training facility in Toronto
I looked at the list of contributors published on the website and realized they had, considering the matching donations provision, already given more than enough to cover those expenses.
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