Prevention can stop homelessness before it starts
At United Way instead of asking the question, How do we help the homeless? or How do we make sure people who are homeless have a safe place to live? We started thinking about this community issue differently. Instead, we asked: What if we prevented homelessness from ever happening in the first place?
At United Way, innovation is important to us when we work to solve our communities’ biggest issues – instead of trying to solve a problem that exists, we are working to prevent the problem from ever happening. In this video, inspired by a story of a local Fargo family, we show how we can start stopping it before it starts by engaging the right help at the right time.
In this video, we saw how oftentimes it’s a crisis that can be the first step in a family becoming homeless. In this story, it was a job loss but it could be a medical emergency, a mental health issue, or the death of a family member or loved one.
Often times these crises spiral, and there is a domino effect that causes a family to become homeless. The stress and trauma these families experience can often create a vicious cycle that lasts for generations.
Children who experience homelessness in their childhood, are more likely to experience homelessness as an adult, and the cycle continues.