With the Grants pass decision in late June, the issue of sweeps has magnified across the nation. Politicians have integrated rhetoric to supposedly fight homelessness in their platform but the policies continue to follow the same trend of intensifying sweeps and criminalizing those swept. The same tactic that has persisted for decades has yet to reap any viable solution to addressing the issue.
As people continue to get swept, the trend of excluding them from conversations about how to fight sweeps also continues. The Western Regional Advocacy Project had identified this trend decades ago when the people most directly impacted by homelessness i.e. people on the streets were consistently excluded from conversations about solutions or utilized merely as props to support hollow campaigns.
With all the Lived Experience and Narrative Change efforts that have sprung up across the country lately, it is imperative that these individual experiences and “new narratives” being built off them are directly tied to the broader experiences of community members living in similar situations. So called solutions to end homelessness can not be created without the people who are actually homeless. We need to move away from telling people in the streets what they need and instead let them tell us what course to take.
People’s stories aren’t ever going to be copies of one another but the trends that bind those stories together help provide a more comprehensive narrative and analysis to the issue of homelessness that can then move the systems driving homeless policy, public education and funding in a way that uplifts our community. That enables us to finally address what the hell happened and why we opened FEMA funded general public emergency shelter systems in the early 1980’s.
The core approach WRAP Members use is community based documented street outreach conducted on a one on one basis to identify those common threads and in addition to this information the individual stories bring life to those common experiences and can better guide our responses. The individual is always vital, we are human beings that have been relegated to “the homeless” and “them” but “WE” gives our experiences much greater power to change shit then “I.”
Outreach then for WRAP and its members is a principle pillar of our organizing that centers those directly impacted by sweeps and shapes our advocacy around them. We can not continue to launch different initiatives that do not reflect the genuine conditions of people on the streets. It is powerful to ensure the reality of what they face is platformed. Beyond visibility, the outreach will help guide and support the direction of our organizing.
How to get involved
Community outreach is a basic practice that allows for organizations to directly integrate into their communities, hear and uplift the voices of people in the street, and orient the direction of their advocacy and organizing in alignment with their experiences. WRAP encourages everybody who sees the value in community outreach to participate in our Housekeys not Handcuffs outreach campaign. All relevant resources can be found on our website and we can be contacted at wrap@wraphome.org. We look forward to strengthening our ties to our community and to each other!
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