GreatNonprofits Day Out - collecting feedback from the homeless in San Francisco
What an incredible day! SFConnect invited us to go with them to HuntersPoint/BayView to collect feedback on their services from homeless people that they serve and their volunteers. We brought 20 laptops (generously loaned to us by friends at McKinsey & Co, SterlingStamos, California Community Tech Foundation and Computer Recycling Center), our own electricity generator, server and wireless router. Great friends - Lloyd Niemetz, founder of HelpArgentina now Stanford MBA student, Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, and Maryann Fernandez of Shaking the Tree - volunteered to collect feedback from the homeless. The excellent interns at YouthNoise came out with documentary film pro Allister Williams and made short video interviews with the homeless. You can watch them here
It was an eye-opening experience for us. There in the middle of the warehouse district of San Francisco, was what almost seemed like a huge music festival. SFConnect had provided a local band that was stirring up the beat and a hot lunch, in addition to tables upon tables of volunteers ready to sign up homeless people for services or to give them services on the spot. We talked to one homeless person who was ecstatic that he was able to get his cavities filled by dentists on the spot. Another who got a haircut. You can read these reviews by the homeless here yourself.
We were all struck by how much the homeless enjoyed being asked about their opinion. It made me wonder how common, we as a nonprofit sector who talk so much about "empowering" the people we serve, is it that we ask the people that we serve for their opinion on how we are serving them.
We also certainly learned a lot about the challenges of collecting feedback from clients when they are, as in this case, mostly very low-income, not educated and not online. It takes effort to collect feedback from such a population.
Yet what I take away from this experience the most deeply is how much we enjoyed talking to these homeless folks. Sean and Maryann emailed me to thank them for giving them the opportunity to do intake - before I could email my thank-yous to them. I think it was such a rewarding experience for all of us because we connected with people who we usually think of as different, or separate from us. And we realized that they really weren't that different than you or I - and we felt that common bond of humanity. Days like this - out in the sun, in the blistery summer San Francisco wind, in the middle of a parking lot with hundreds of volunteers and homeless people and talking with them and laughing at their jokes - are so incredibly alive and vivid. My days in the office in front of my computer are bland and pale by comparison.
Take a look for yourself at who we talked to and what they said and let me know what you think!
