April 27, 2006

Director's Corner

By Tim Harris

This morning I realized that more than a quarter of my life has been spent here, in Seattle, doing Real Change. It was one of those early morning subconscience-gone-out-for-a-walk kind of things, which is entirely appropriate. Real Change began as a dream, and twelve years later, is a bit of a dream come true.

One of our vendors, Fred, stopped into my storage room cum office last week to say that after more than two years on the street he'd gotten into low-income housing and was no longer homeless. He described the sheer joy of a room where the toilet is only three doors down the hall. Fred was a little choked up as he told me that Real Change had made it possible in more ways than one. "It kept me out of trouble," he said. "Without Real Change I really don't know where I'd be now."

We’re still making an immediate difference in hundreds of lives while building a more just future for all of us.

During the 80s, when I first started working with homeless people, homelessness in America tripled and quadrupled over a single decade. The task then was to mitigate the suffering while building a movement for justice. Mitigation, it turns out, was the easy part. The task of movement-building has eluded us all.

Everyone now, it seems, is talking about “ending homelessness.” Our job, now more than ever, is to help make the talk real.