The Good. The Bad. The Ugly. The End.
The Good
The plan was to assemble and distribute 180 essential hygiene kits, instead, 435 essential hygiene kits have been given out. Everyone who received a kit has been touched by this project. I have been dropping off large heavy boxes filled with kits every month in 2022 to Dr. David Solomon at the Venice Family Clinic, where he takes them to his outreach clinic The People Concern in Santa Monica and distributes them to their unhoused patients.
Letter Of Appreciation From Dr. Solomon
As the project was about connection, early on I wrote to the CEO of Dr. Bronner’s to let him know how we were using his company’s lavender liquid soap. After decades of reading Dr. Bronner's soap labels exclaiming “ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL” it made sense to do this. He had hundreds of containers of soap and toothpaste sent to me. What made this act so good is Humans Helping Humans is intentionally a community and social DIY project and not a formal charity. There is not a way for a corporation to make a donation and write it off, yet Dr. Bronner’s made a donation, a substantial one. What also gave me faith in the goodness of people is the many who have supported this project financially and in other ways, if you are one of them and reading this thank you.
While knowing that hygiene kits address an immediate need and won’t solve the longer-term needs of people living in desperate poverty on the streets, it feels good to make them knowing you are helping others. The process is a form of charity, a form of community service, a small mend in our ripped social fabric, an act of humanity. I recommend it. What can I say?
The Bad
I had huge ambitions for this project despite a humble ask to raise $5,000 among friends and family. When I didn’t meet the projects initial funding goal from my initial email, I made a video a website and a GoFundMe page. I spent more money in time and resources trying to raise money than the amount of money I was trying to raise. It didn’t make sense how much effort was required to raise such a small amount.
Total raised: $2,224
Total spent: $5,407
Link to project finances: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1niBsOo5Tv8hQiuujZvsF3FyQPpcXuvIJLeUZC80vq-s/edit?usp=sharing
While the purpose of this project was to distribute hygiene kits my vision was for a factory in LA to be set up as a socially based entity to produce all the contents for the kits including the bags using natural ingredients and compostable packaging. Training and Jobs would be giving to those living on the streets to get them off the streets. It was more than the kits. It was about community, connection, and this vision.
The kits were also meant as a mirror to reflect our lives. The amount of products we all have in our bathrooms is out of control. Most of the stuff in our bathrooms is unnecessary, useless, and much of it toxic for our skin and the world. Multiply this by all the bathrooms in the western world and you can see a problem whose scope is global. Humans don’t need 4 types of soaps for hygiene. There was an article in the New Yorker about the history of soap that affirmed my own thoughts about the need for only one type of soap. It’s an interesting read https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/rethinking-the-science-of-skin.
Then there is the packaging it comes in, mostly single use plastic. Our behavior around plastic use can be politely described as normalized insanity. This is why the bags were made out of canvas, the toothbrushes were made from bamboo, and stimudents made from wood were included in the kits. Reducing our hygiene needs to what is essential is not just for people living on the street, it’s for us as well, as we need to change too.
I wanted to make the first kits exactly how I imagined and drew them. One of my insights was that if you have nothing a good high quality bag was extremely valuable, so one was provided. This drove the price of the kits up substantially. The initial kits cost $33.15 mostly in part because the cost of the bag. People were turned off by how much the kits cost and told me so. This project was not about making the cheapest hygiene kits possible. It was about making essential kits with an intention of providing high quality useful products that would last a long time using less plastic and waste. I wasn’t insensitive to costs. The last batch of kits cost $6.32.
I wrote a brochure that was included in the kits, more like a mini-manifesto. It was disappointing that no one who received a kit made contact through the brochure.
Distributing high quality kits with a goal of no plastic waste came from thinking about how we should engage with the humanitarian crises in front of us based on the understanding that you can’t solve problems the same way they were created. I believe the following statement is radical because it is sensible. Societal problems cannot be solved by causing environmental damage while attempting to solve them. This is why minimizing waste and single plastic was a strategic intent from the beginning. I believe we need new ideas and new approaches to address poverty. I also believe as awful as the situation is, it is also an opportunity for social innovation and a place to test and experiment with new ideas. Not just with hygiene kits but with shelter as well, more specifically with shelter in fact. While I was able to demonstrate a different approach with these kits, the long-term thinking never went anywhere as I was not able to raise even the small humble amount to properly launch the project.
I envisioned the kits as a way to build connection and thus community and wanted to have people join me in distributing kits, this proved difficult as well and why I eventually found a health organization that dealt with this population to distribute them. When my friends Karen and Zoe went with me to give out kits on the street, I observed women on the street related much different to other women than to me. It hit me the reason for this was that women on the streets had been raped or sexually abused and once I realized this, this thought brutalized me.
This community building is tough. This homeless situation is tough. It’s all around us. Its desperate. Its horrible it effects us all. We all are aware of it, complain about it want something done about it, yet we have become experts at ignoring it. Even myself someone who was steeped in it and trying to get this project off the ground it was hard to keep at it. I wanted to change the world, but you can’t change the world if you can’t raise $5,000 and I was not able to do that.
The Ugly
“No one has ever become poor by giving” --Anne Frank
This project ended up being an unintended social experiment. The amount of resistance to supporting it was stunning and unexpected. I lost 2 friends and other relationships were put under stress.
During COVID I got into the habit of walking from my home in Santa Monica to my office on Abbot Kinney in Venice. On one of my walks I filled a backpack with clothes to give out and realized how extra stressed this population was. Talking to someone living on the street while giving them clothes I asked what else they needed. When they told me Hygiene Kits a proverbial lightbulb went off as I had previously conceived of this project years ago after doing deeper thinking about the issues of poverty, inequality, mental illness, drug addiction aka the humanitarian crises in front of us all in Los Angeles that pejoratively effects all of our lives by degrading our public space and rips our social fabric that needs to be woven, patched, mended and darned with urgency.
I felt I needed to show people that the project was real and bring it to life, before asking for support and I did by starting it and distributing kits to all Homeless Veterans in Los Angeles living on the sidewalk in front of Veterans Park. It took years to get to this point. But I finally got here and I was excited about seeing it grow. I wrote a letter that I shared with friends and family that included these words:
“While this project needs funding, it also needs engagement and connection. This needs to be a loud raucous band and not a singer song writer act. Join me. Let’s make it louder together.”
I then send the letter and very soon after I receive my first response a friend I have known for 30 years. I was the best man at her wedding.
“I’m glad you found a project that is meaningful to you. Go get em. I have no interest in supporting financially given the rude comments you’ve made about me and my husband. I hope you do some good”
The “go get em” really got me. I stare at it dumbstruck. I think of all the work, energy and resources it took to get here. The list I sent this to is small bordering on intimate, I need my friends and family to support this, to get behind it, anything but this this. I have no idea what rude comments she is talking about—what does one have to do with the other anyway? The only thing that kept me spinning into a dark place was it’s egregiousness.
Money is not the issue here or maybe it is. The first three friends to enthusiastically support the project with funds and words of encouragement are my three poorest friends. This friend was born into privilege and is among a group of my friends and family members who could have funded the entire project with ease (not that I was expecting her to do this).
As I am reliving this ugly moment it dawns on me what the rude comments are that she mentions. In the letter I wrote:
“When I had the idea to start distributing essential hygiene kits to poor unsheltered people in 2019, I asked a dear friend (who happens to be a retired millionaire) for funding and encouragement to make the first batch of kits. He blew me off like a vinyl siding salesman making a cold call. That knocked me down. I got up, brushed off, and reached out to a couple of charities to see if there was discretionary funds to make emergency hygiene kits. None were. I needed it to flow and it wasn’t. “
The dear old friend that I had reached out to a couple of years earlier was her husband asking him to work with me to start it. The way he blew me off was hurtful. We discussed it and moved on. I intentionally left his name out of the letter I sent out so there would be no bad feelings.
Starting this project is an opportunity for me and him to have a reset. He knows I was hurt by how he acted the first time I approached him. I really don’t want a repeat. It would be nothing for him to throw $20 bucks towards a kit as a way of showing some support. He doesn’t. I don’t understand why someone would want to be my friend and so actively aggressively, stubbornly not support this knowing that it would be hurtful so I stop speaking with him too. While writing this, I send him a letter asking for a different ending. He ignores my letter. We have a repeat.
There were many other friends and family members, people who know me and love who didn’t give, some even after asking multiple times. There was a stubbornness, a recalcitrance, about it that just didn’t make sense to me that wasn’t personal. I stopped asking realizing that it didn’t matter. This project would never grow organically on a grass roots level and my vision for it would not be realized.
This project needed energy from the world and while it certainly got some beautiful energy it just didn’t get enough to vibrate and make the loud raucous noise it needed to make.
People seem to hate the poor. I recently found myself in a discussion on the app “Next Door” about the humanitarian crises that is called homelessness. Someone challenged me and asked “What are you doing to help?” I posted a link to Humans Helping Humans website. Instead of making a nominal donation, or saying “nice work” her response was call it a scam and accuse me of getting rich because I ask for donations on the website.
I said this earlier in the piece but it is worth repeating. By helping the poor you are helping yourself as it’s beneficial to society. People are looking for a solution to homelessness not realizing that the problem that needs to be solved isn’t homelessness it’s poverty. The solution is to change society, in order for the situation to change.
There is within this an uncomfortable question that needs to be asked and that is what do we owe the poor living on the streets? Perhaps here is a way to begin answering it. Every day people who are sick and weak are dying inside tents on the streets of Los Angeles. If we as a society are not going to provide sick people with medical care, sick people with a place to rest, sick people with meals the least it can do, is provide them a dignified place to die rather than in tents on the streets of one of the wealthiest cities in America.
My friend Jim Glanzer was the most menschy and straightforward of all my friends who didn’t want to give. He called me up and said this was a government problem to solve and not an individual problem to solve. Which I agree with. He told me I was wasting my time and talents and my time was better spent doing other things. He was probably right. He also told me that he lives in NY and not LA and this was not his issue. Then he gave a nominal donation.
There is a lot to learn from Jim from how he handled things. When friends, colleagues, people you know do things, even if you don’t agree with what they are doing, or maybe even how they are doing them, they need your support. Its not the money. Its the energy. It’s the feeling they get knowing people who know them are behind them and believe in them. Support them.
The End.