The first thing you need to do is not personalize societal failure as your personal problem. Don’t put too much on yourself.
If you’re looking to donate, partner with local groups who are making a difference. They’ll know what the local needs are right now. It’s a neverending problem, but certainly more acute right now.
It is though but not only his fault but we as individuals form a society and we are failing our people by doing nothing about the politicians , corporates etc
On top of knowing the needs, such groups, generally, have the means to utilise the money more effectively dollar for dollar than an individual because they can buy wholesale and have deals with different companies.
+1 I bought new shoes and decided to give my old ones away on the street. Wasn’t hard, met some nice and appreciative people. Just watch out for people that obviously aren’t your size, they’ll just resell
This isn’t necessarily true. A lot of encampments develop social roles, there’s often someone who can tend to wounds, someone who knows how to cook anything using a wide variety of heat sources, someone that keeps track of the individual needs of everyone else at the camp, someone who can cut hair, someone who collects stuff for distribution within the camp, etc.
In a lot of cases physical donations will end up at the camp and either be shared when possible or redistributed to a specific person that can use it.
There are of course unhoused people that don’t make it to camps or who have left camps, and if they resell the boots, so what? You’re still helping them.
Honestly? Just give the $200 to the shelter to spend on whatever they think they need. As someone who used to volunteer at a no-kill shelter, everybody wants to donate a bag of dog food but no one wants to donate cash. After a certain point, we were throwing away old stock of unopened dog food because we ran out of storage for it.
Edit: completely misread the part about helping people specifically not in a shelter. My main point still stands though, I think most unhoused people would take the cash over material goods.
You know we’re not talking about dogs here, right homie?
Yes, but the point still stands. Everyone loves the grand gesture of walking in and plopping a 20lb bag of chow on the counter or heroically presenting a homeless man on the corner with a brand new The North Face coat with tags on it.
I’m speaking from an American perspective for this next part, so if OP isn’t from America they can disregard it, but the whole gift-giving ritual (which this is) makes people feel embarrassed for giving cash outright, like “oh, you couldn’t think of anything to get them?” It’s a difficult truth to swallow but the truth is that most community closets, food banks, etc. are more than stocked with the goods themselves. Homeless people in most of the country have at least some access to these basic goods. What they don’t have is money to save for either A) their specific needs that only they know about or B) some sort of safe housing arrangement.
Same thing I saw when I volunteered at a shelter. Americans love the warm feeling they get when they give someone less successful than them a physical item, but the second you tell them the cash would be more useful they get indignant. It shatters their illusion that they, and they alone, were making some huge expenditure.
Last Lemmy version had federation issues - the current one (0.19.2) supposedly fixed them. New threads should be populating correctly now, maybe give it a couple of days and check again?
If you do want to switch, the instance I’m on only blocks pornlemmy.com, ds9.lemmy.ml, voyager.lemmy.ml and enterprise.lemmy.ml: reddthat.com/instances
If they bring a generator to the water pump near my house I’m shutting off my water and heading to my sister’s house.
In 2021, the morning of the big freeze they parked a big diesel generator at the water pump. They told us there would be rolling blackouts, but we ended up losing power for 4 days. After it got down to 40° in my house, I drove halfway across the metroplex in snow and ice, with my kids, to my sister’s house because she had power.
Her house is on the same grid as a hospital, she never lost power. Not even a blip. Mine is just a suburban neighborhood. I’m convinced they knew they were going to kill our power for an extended time, so they brought out the generator for their water pump. But they didn’t tell us, so we were unable to properly prepare. So not only did a lot of people have damage that could have been prevented, but my kids now get scared every time it gets cold thinking we’ll be in the same situation again.
I’m one of those psychos who flash custom roms just because I can, so that is a big time consuming activity I have with my phone, other than that I usually use Sync for Lemmy, Sync for Reddit, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Feeder/Feedly and Firefox Beta, among other apps.
Idk but wtf are people always doing on their phone in the car. Am I the weird one where I can’t even think of anything I’d like to do on my phone while driving? I can change media and text my wife all via voice control if I need to.
I used to try to use voice control for changing media when driving, but found it hilariously unreliable since it had to try to parse the voice command through the music. Is there a trick to that besides having a better mic I’m missing?
I dunno about everything, but my car has a talk button on the steering wheel, I think you press it to answer the phone or whatever, but when Android Auto is active, that button works the same as saying “OK Google”. I would imagine it does something similar with CarPlay. Maybe you have a similar button?
In my car (2016), Bluetooth supports phone calls and that’s it, so I have a separate Bluetooth receiver always plugged into my aux port. So I have to cycle music manually.
Similar to the other person that replied to ya, I’m in an older vehicle so I don’t have anything like that in mine, instead relying on either aux cable or bluetooth receiver to connect the phone to the audio system. It got to the point that I got a bluetooth media remote to get around the unreliability of voice commands.
Idk what system you’re using but I use CarPlay and android auto. Both of them are able to mute when I press the chat button or if I yell “hey whatever”
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