Storytelling can save the world

I used to work at a homeless shelter.

My job was to train psychology interns to use the therapeutic model by developing trust with the clients/residents there and linking them with social services. I told the kids that all the residents there had a story to tell. I wanted them to get the stories. They could use those stories to be the middle connection between social worker and client and counselor to client.

If someone will tell you their story you’ve begun to build trust. If you do that you can begin to connect them to services that may help them recover from the many different reasons people become homeless in today’s world.

Homeless people are not used to being listened to. They are used to being invisible.

I’m not going to preach about the ills of today here. Not the place for it. I just wanted to list a benefit of storytelling in connecting with clients. Sometimes the greatest thing you can do to help someone is facilitate storytelling. Can we get our blogging ‘clients’ to tell us their story? Would it help our business?

Wehn you persuade them to share their story you are part of the creative process. The story was there before you, but no one knew it other than the client. Now you know it and can share it with the clients’ social workers, counselors, whatever they allow you to do with it. You can change a person’s entire world through storytelling. Ellen DeGeneres is a great storytelling facilitator. Just throwing that in there.

You can do that with your blog clients. I’m trying to learn how to do that within the confines of the blogging world now. What could you do with the information from your readers? Design the perfect products for them? Remember Ross Perot?

Ross Perot ran for president twice in 92 and 96 and made a good size dent in the system. His fortune came from selling computers. You know what he did? He went to schools and asked the teachers what they would want if they could design their own computers for their classes. Then he had the factory build that computer and offered it to the schools based on the teacher’s recommendations and sold record numbers of them. He was worth 4 or 5 billion by the time he was running for president. He was just an IBM salesman out of the military. Didn’t start out rich, but he is now.

He got his clients to tell him their story.

The point of bringing Ross Perot into this is he used storytelling in this same way I taught the interns. By facilitating storytelling and he found out what his customers wanted. The students did the same thing with homeless people and used that story to help them end their homelessness.

We did gain some incredible stories along with helping many people. We had former NBA players that found themselves homeless as clients in the shelter. MMA fighters, Wall Street brokers that lost it all for various reasons. We also had homeless clients who we encouraged to sign up for community college and completed their degrees while at the shelter. The culinary arts degree was popular.

One story that affected me more than most was that of a man around 80 that passed away the night he told me his story. He died peacefully in his bunk. He needed to tell his story and I was honored and feel fortunate to have been the one who listened to him.

I think it is an important story. Let me tell you a bit about this shelter set up so his story makes more sense.

The shelter is the first of its kind in the country.

The county sheriff runs it and the public defender’s office works with the sheriff to staff and help the residents. It is a full sevice shelter. Counselors, medical, social worker, legal aid, they had it all. The public defender’s office hired counselors and social workers to work at the shelter. The sheriff did the same but their primary role is security at the shelter. With over 400 homeless people staying there on average they had plenty to do.

This man, this old veteran who told me his story had worked for the public defender’s office. That was his job. He didn't tell anyone he worked with about his issue. He owned his own home, had loving family members. Wasn’t mentally ill or addicted to chemicals of any kind. He wasn’t a criminal and was for all you could see a solid citizen in his community.

So how did he become homeless? A series of events that might happen to any of us. His mind began to go on him. No one knew it. He was in his 80’s and it just happened. He stopped paying his bills right or on time or at all, his family wasn’t aware of any problems from what we could find out. No one checked on his financial health. He was dad, the solid one. He had full retirement and social security he was fine, right?

He lost his house for not paying his bills

It appeared to have been auctioned off. He lost everything. He was wandering the streets not sure what to do. He was not used to needing help. He was proud but didn’t know what to do when his mind was failing him.

We have an officer who usually takes all the homeless calls and he found him sitting at a bus stop emaciated but no- he was not drunk. He made no sense to the officer, but he had a lot of training with crisis intervention and took him to the shelter after he was cared for medically.

Someone like him falls through the cracks in our system. Our community ways. No system is perfect. But his is a cautionary tale. You can have it all sorted out in your life, but one thing can go wrong and it all fall apart. There are things you can do to prevent that though. Many of you have already thought of them as you read this.

Do them, comment about them here please.

The man lived 80 odd years. But he may have had a few more years if just one thing was different. Was it his family’s fault? Should they have gotten more involved in his life? Was it his pride? Should he have told his kids something was wrong? Should he have turned his finances over to his family? If you lose your mind to dementia how do you know what to do? I don’t remember when his wife passed, but it was several years earlier I’m pretty sure.

Maybe the community could have found out what was wrong instead of taking his home. It takes people who care to make systems work properly. The law that allowed them to take his home was not designed to work that way, not for someone in his situation. He had money to pay the bills, but lost his mental abilities. I think society can learn from him. I went back to the shelter the next day and it was no different. There was no mention of him all day. No one seemed to know anything was off.

I was the only one he told his story to. So I had to tell them at the shelter. I told the interns, my boss and the social services staff. They are the ones who dug up a lot of the information about this guy. Now I have told you.

How his situation fell apart is tragic. Not all homeless people are drug addicts or drunks.

They have stories also. We all do.