Massaging Life into a Wooden Leg: Ending Street Homelessness in 150 Cities by 2030

I know: you're wondering which leg it is, aren’t you?

The phrase “massaging life into a wooden leg,” originates from Central and Eastern Europe, and it’s an expression that means bringing a dormant seed to life. Making the impossible possible.

Some people can do just that, given the proper support.

I grew up in the north east of England on a council estate, or project. I was lucky enough to have a warm, loving family, who looked after me. I went off to school, I had opportunities, I went to University, and from there I could choose my career.

But if I looked over my shoulder, where I grew up, you could see that not everyone was so lucky. From that, I have always been motivated to try and help those who are struggling in life. I have worked in the homelessness sector for over 30 years. I started as a volunteer in a day center at a time when I used to teach for a living. After a while, I started to realize that this volunteering was that was giving me life, and 26 years ago, I became involved the startup of a homeless charity that now works in six countries with over 15,000 clients.

It's been an incredible experience. I've learnt a lot about how organizations work, but more importantly I've learned about the power of people. The power of leaders. For most of my career people have said, "It’s impossible to work in this country, it's too corrupt," or, "Your goals for growth are too ambitious and you'll never achieve them."

But it's a very good thing to be ambitious, for people out there who need help. It is absolutely possible to do impossible things.

Let me tell you a story.

This photograph was taken late at night on a very cold winter evening on the streets of Kharkiv just before Christmas in 2006. Kharkiv is located on the eastern border of Ukraine about seven miles from the Russian border. It is the country’s second biggest city - famous for heavy industry and in particular the manufacturing of tanks during the Soviet period. It’s also the closest city to the conflict zone in the Donbas region, which has led to almost one million internally displaced people moving up through the Kharkiv region trying to find safety and sanctuary in other parts of Ukraine. However, this story predates those events.

The two boys in the photograph are called Ivan and Vladimir, both aged 14, and they are freezing cold. It's a November night, and they've been outside all day. They are trying to get warm. This will be their one and only meal of the day – a thick soup called borscht, some bread, and sweet tea. Afterwards, we're going to give them chocolate, because they're children, and they like chocolate.

Ivan and Vladimir are two of literally hundreds of children living on the streets of the city. Either abandoned by their family, sent in from the countryside to beg, or fleeing abuse, they set up camps underground in the sewer system or heating ducts, laying their sleeping bags on top of hot water pipes to keep warm, in gangs of five to ten. Some children are as young as eight.

These children survive by begging, petty theft, and sporadic work on the market carrying goods or cleaning up. Young girls in the gang would often be pressured into prostitution so that the rest could eat. Glue sniffing was the drug of choice. Self-harm was exceedingly common, especially evident on the girls.

The year before that photograph was taken, I was in Kharkiv, underground, doing an assessment of these young people. My translator was a young Ukrainian guy and Vincentian priest called Vitaliy Novak. To the right is him on a horse in his home region of Transcarpathia.

That is not his only method of transport. He also drives a car like every road is a Formula One track. In addition, he is chaplain to the Polish branch of the Hells Angels and leads an annual pilgrimage ride across Europe on his donated BMW 1300 cc motorcycle. Vitaliy was in his late 20’s, spoke more than seven languages comfortably, and is one of those people you meet from time to time who lights up a room when he walks into it. He has a laugh that just gets everybody involved.

But when we were underground on this night, the last thing Vitaliy was doing was laughing. He couldn't translate; the emotion was so deep at the stories being told that he had to hesitate. When we ended the evening, we went for a drink and he said, “Mark, I have to do something for these children. I don't know what it is. But I have to do something."

What must be done?

What can I do?

We talked late into the night. I invited Vitally and his friends and colleagues to visit our charities working with homeless people in the UK and Ireland to see what kind of services we provided. I encouraged them to think about how these services might be translated into a Ukrainian context. At first, frankly, it was overwhelming for them to see the kind of resources we had at our disposal. Shelters, hostels, medical centers, outreach.

So we agreed: let's do something. Let's start a subsidiary, but let's keep it simple.

"Good," said Vitaliy. "We'll keep it simple."

Vitaliy went back to the Ukraine and bought a mini bus, which would eventually be named Depaulka. He did all the work himself, fitting it out with a soup kitchen, seated area and a small medical space for a nurse to treat the children. Three weeks later, he rang me and said, "Right! I'm off."

Perfect. Simple.

But it was anything but simple. In the first week the Police took Vitally and our staff and volunteer team in for questioning three times. They said the same thing every time: “If you feed these children then they will come back every night.”

"That is exactly the point," Vitaliy answered. "I want them to come back every night."

After a few months the police and local authorities grudgingly accepted our presence on the street, but they continued to make it difficult. Every single night we operated we had to drive the minibus to a garage so it could be passed as fit for service by a mechanic. Then we would have to drive the minibus to a doctor so that Vitaliy himself could be certified as being safe to drive.

Over that first year, we built up to serving 50 children a night. But for every one of those 50 individual meals, every night, we had to fill out 32 forms for various departments of the local authority. 32! Our administrative costs were actually higher than operating costs.

I think I would have surrendered, personally. But Vitaliy and his team did not. They understood that to change things for these kids also meant taking a long term view. Vitaliy told me that under communism if you were out walking and you happened upon a queue (or a line as, Americans call it), you joined it. You didn't know what was at the end of it, but you hoped it was going to be something good.

For things to happen, it might take a long time, and you might now know what's at the end; but you have to join the queue. You have to be patient and resilient.

Today, the biggest referral agents into our projects in Ukraine are the very same police force and local authorities that resisted us initially and imposed bureaucratic road blocks. Today Vitaliy is the chair of a charity serving over 4500 homeless people a year in four regions of the country. The introduction of fostering and adoption in the Ukraine has lowered the number of street children, but we branched out. We have expanded our work into day centers working with homeless older people, night shelters, and hostels for homeless women with babies. We have a Ukrainian board of Directors overseeing the charity and making long term plans. We have trained social workers and medical staff. Ivan, one of the street children in the first picture, is working, married with children, and volunteers in one of our soup kitchens.

So what is the learning from this? There are hundreds of Vitaliys around the world. I know this because they send me messages all the time. From Latin America, Africa, Asia. From other parts of Central and Eastern Europe. From the UK. From the USA. All of them are desperate to do something about homelessness in their midst – a homelessness growing globally due to urbanization, social and economic change.

They want somebody to recognize them. They want somebody to dream with them, to encourage them. They need the training to get the right skills, the resources to begin their work, the networks to know what is good practice and what is bad practice, and they need a long-term commitment to making a difference.

So. My latest impossible thing is called the Institute of Global Homelessness, and what we're going to do is provide emerging leaders from around the world with these things. But we have a bigger ambition as well: we're going to bring the existing leaders in research, advocacy, policy, and practice together to set an overarching goal of ending homelessness in 150 cities by 2030.

People will say that it's impossible. But I don't believe them. I think it's possibly, entirely, to do it.

And how can you be part of this? Well, you could do what I did and volunteer in a shelter. If you have a business, you could offer a homeless person a new start through an internship or job. You could offer yourself as a mentor to a a person leaving homelessness or a young leader in the sector, like Vitaliy.

But here's the simplest thing you could do: as you leave today you could stop and say hello to the person you pass sleeping on a shop doorway. You could do that.

The children on the mini- bus in the photo, laughing in Depaulka, don't come along just for the bread, just for the soup. They don't come just for the chocolate, or just for the medical advice. They come along because for half an hour in one day, somebody has treated them with kindness, and respect. Involved them in conversation. Homelessness is a physical state but it's also a spiritual separation.

So, look. Go out. If you find a wooden leg, massage it to life. With two legs, you move that much quicker to the end of the line, and we end homelessness. Together.

#TedX #DePaulUniversity #MarkMcGreevy #DePaulInternational