practical – Page 3

What about the Pets?

What about the pets, you ask? What do the homeless do with them when they become homeless? We can’t answer for everyone, but we can tell you what we’ve observed in our years in the motels.

Shelters are overflowing with pets whose owners can no longer afford to take care of them. Some have been responsibly surrendered. Many have been abandoned, their secure little worlds ripped apart by owners too self-centered to do the right thing by their loyal companions.

Interestingly enough, we’ve observed that the motels abound with pets. Why would anyone want to hold onto a pet they can’t feed or take care of, you ask? Because their owners can’t imagine abandoning them or giving them up to a shelter for certain death. Just as they would never give up their children, most motel residents do not abandon their pets. They do the best they can to take care of them.

Succession Plan–Do you have one?

Does your organization have a succession plan? If it’s only in your head, you don’t. A good succession plan must be in writing. What is a succession plan, you ask? It’s the guarantee that your vision, your passion, your life’s work will continue in the event of your untimely catastrophic injury or even worse, death.

You come a long way from the day when you decide to hand a homeless person a sandwich, to the day you serve thousands of people every year. Building that kind of ministry takes planning and the successful persistence of it is in the details. If the details die with you, the ministry dies with you.

Taking Time Off

Taking time off. It doesn’t seem like something you should do if you’re truly committed to helping the homeless, right? Wrong!!! The absolutely worst thing you can do for yourself and your clients is to not allow yourself time off. You are not a machine. You are a normal, flesh and blood human being and just like that machine, you can break down if you don’t take care of yourself.

The cost to yourself isn’t just physical, although that can be pretty tiring in itself. In the course of loving and serving your homeless friends you will see, hear and experience heartbreaking, unspeakably hard things. Over time this has a cumulative effect. If you don’t carve out some separate time for yourself to get away both physically and most importantly, mentally, you will implode. No one was ever meant to keep just “going and going”. You are not the Energizer Bunny. Your batteries will definitely wear out.

What Makes a Great Volunteer?

Volunteers come in all shapes, sizes and attitudes. They range all the way from the ones who are offering you their services because they’re sure they can improve on what you’re doing, to the golden one who states on their volunteer application “Put me in wherever you need me. I just want to help”. This is your Great Volunteer!

Serving Our Homeless Friends with Love

Human nature being what it is, you will get many more of the former than the latter. My advice is to listen to them. Sometimes, they actually are right and have great ideas. Don’t be so arrogant and defensive that you miss the opportunity to improve. After all, you’re out there to help your homeless clients in the way that’s best for them. That means considering anything that might be helpful and feasible.

On the other hand, after careful consideration if what is being suggested is something you know won’t work, because its: too difficult to implement, beyond your budget, dangerous, outside of the scope of your vision/mission, etc., feel free to say so. You are the boss. You get to make the hard/unpopular decisions. It’s up to you to steer the organization in the direction you and your board of directors have decided on.

Don’t try to solve everyone’s problems

The purpose of what we do is to show love

Curb your inclination to want to try to solve everyone’s problems. It doesn’t make you a less compassionate person. It just keeps you sane. For one thing, you rob someone of their dignity when you try to take care of everything for them. It takes a while to develop a sense of what’s right and what’s too much.

Go slowly. How can you do too much, you may ask? They need everything, don’t they? You’ll know that you’ve done too much the first time you have to refuse someone something and all hell breaks loose because you’ve taken care of everything else up to now. Resist the urge to set yourself up as Santa Claus or the Good Fairy. It’s really quite insulting to your clients and exhausting for you. We probably lose more volunteers because of this than anything else.

What about the Pets?

Succession Plan–Do you have one?

Taking Time Off

What Makes a Great Volunteer?

Don’t try to solve everyone’s problems

A tribute to our Founder

What We Do

Contact us