They're homeless, not hopeless

Noah is our CEO and founder. In the office, he’s best known for talking about deadlifting, running into the office with news of a crazy pitch he’s just landed, and talking sternly to Claude when it does something wrong. It’s almost too busy every day to get stuck into the origin story, but this week I finally asked him the question I’d been thinking about: why homelessness? Out of all the causes, what was it about this one that made him dedicate his life to solving it.

This is what he said.

If you’d asked me at fifteen what I was going to do with my life I would have told you with complete seriousness that I was going to play soccer for Manchester United. That was the dream and I spent just about every waking minute kicking a ball at a brick wall to get there. Also grew up boxing, but as per Becky’s last article - somehow she managed to still have me covered!

I grew up in a single mother household with a mum who did absolutely everything for me and we didn’t have a lot. And I mean that in the real way. I was five or something and everyone at school was playing Pokémon and I wanted a Game Boy Colour more than anything in the world and mum saved up everything to get me one for my birthday. Even at that age I could feel the weight of what it cost her. I didn’t understand it but I could feel it. That she’d gone without so I could have this one thing.

And mum always said the same thing. When we get through these hard periods - and she always said when not if - you’ve got to learn how to give back. People have given us so much and life is all about community and having the right people around you. And I filed that away the way kids file away everything their parents say. I heard it but I didn’t hear it. Not yet.

Fast forward and I’m at university and I did what every person in this country has done a thousand times. You walk past someone sleeping on the streets and you know something’s wrong. You’re in one of the richest countries on earth and you have no idea what to do. Drop money in the hat? Look away? And more often than not you just walk past. Out of sight out of mind.

But one day it felt weird. And I think it felt weird because I had mum’s words ringing in my ears. Not as some grand calling. Just - this feels wrong and maybe I can do something.

It wasn’t a declaration. It just started with a conversation and through that I realised there were a lot of beautiful people living life on the streets that the world had just forgotten about. So it became about having more conversations. Then bringing friends along. Then clothes and bread. Then after thousands of conversations - we started to think, maybe we could invest into the people we were meeting. And then Nedd ran across the country and suddenly we had the funds to build something that had never been done before.

The biggest learning I have carried with me, that came through when I started having those conversations and has only become stronger since, was how wrong the stereotypes we have about homelessness are. There are so many people that we as a society have written off, have blamed, have left behind, because we believe that they made their own choices that brought them there. Like everyone, I thought homelessness was just the person on the side of the street. I’m not immune to the stereotypes - none of us are. It’s the man with the brown paper bag. He’s probably made his choices. That’s just what we think.

But one of the very first people I met was a young girl. She would’ve been around the same age as my sister - 14 or 15. And like anyone I assumed there was a reason she was out there. But she was lucid. Sober. Spoke just like my sister. I asked her why she didn’t just go home and what she told me I’ll never forget. Every place that was supposed to be safe - her home, her relatives, the system - had failed and committed unspeakable acts against her. And this girl looked me in the eyes and said she chose to sit out here in the city in the cold because at least there was light and if the same things happened to her, “well at least someone might see it and stop them”. The city streets were the safest place she could think of.

And that’s when I started to realise that homelessness is so much deeper and broader than I ever could have imagined. It’s not just the person who’s made their decisions. It’s circumstances completely outside of people’s control. Support networks falling apart. I was so blessed to have the right support network with my mum - but imagine if I didn’t.

And the more I learned, the more it kept expanding. I thought homelessness was just about people on the streets. Then I learned that out of the 122,000 people facing homelessness in this country, only about 6% of them are actually sleeping rough. Over 100,000 people are in what’s called secondary or tertiary homelessness. It’s the mother escaping domestic violence who’s staying on a friend’s couch. The father who’s just lost his job and is sleeping in his car with his two kids. The young kid who’s escaped a dangerous situation and is couch surfing place to place. These are people who’ve had circumstances outside of their control and they’re homeless - not hopeless.

It’s been a ten year journey that feels like a flash but in the same breath it also feels like it’s been the entirety of my life. Somewhere between that first bag of bread and today - $4 million dollars distributed, 1,500 people housed, programs that are the first of their kind in this country - somewhere in that stretch it just became who I am. Not what I do. Who I am. And no one would have guessed it. Not my mates. Not my mum. Not even me.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve spent my life just trying to solve the problems in front of me. I never set out to solve homelessness, but the more I learnt about it, the less I could ignore it. All I know now is that I’ve found something that I can wake up and do every single day, and I know that it will leave the world slightly better than I found it.