It's all in the paperwork...

I think I mentioned in one of my first few blog posts that we have our annual banquet coming up and, as the Marketing Director, most of the planning and preparation falls on me. This year's theme is "One Passion, One Vision, One Purpose... Rescue Them."

I wasn't here when they worked that one out but I have to admit, I like it. It's a bit dramatic. But I like it, nonetheless.

A big key to any major event like this is to make sure it has a fluid, consistent theme or "brand." So you have to identify what the "heart" of the event is. For me, in the planning phase, I really gravitated to the "them" part of "Rescue them."

Who is "them?" What do they look like? Where did they come from?

If the purpose of the event is to encourage donors to give, who are they giving to? What's the end point of that dollar amount?

So I decided to interview clients. And by "clients" I mean homeless people. It became important to me that our donors "meet" these people and understand what they have struggled with. I'm not talking about the typical things that everyone can count on their fingers. We ALL know that homeless people struggle with finding food and shelter, getting clean, seeking medical care, being safe, etc... As important as those things are, they're just the surface.

I wanted to show our donors Rebecca, who struggles with bipolar disorder and has attempted suicide more than 10 times. Her mental illness has nearly debilitated her and, because of the state of our healthcare system, there's very little help she can receive to live a functional life.

I wanted to show them David, who's son died tragically in a car accident and it sent him into a downward spiral of addiction to soothe the pain he felt.

And Kenneth who's father beat him so badly that he ran away and has been living on the streets ever since.

They're not just clients or wallflowers. They're not these fixtures you get used to seeing on certain street corners. They're real people who hurt just like you do.

I have 36 transcribed interviews and photos sitting on my desk. That's 36 of the 8,000 "clients" in Seattle. And when I thumb through them my heart breaks because each one of those pieces of paper is someone who is worthy of love and NEEDS our help. Each one of those pieces of paper is a face that smiles at me when I leave every night, or greets me when I arrive, or wishes me a good day.

When I was a little girl and my mother and I would drive through the bad part of town I used to tell her that, when I was all grown up and rich, I would paint every single person's house and make sure they all had a nice place to live.

I wish the ideals that spring from the innocence of adolescence would bleed into adulthood a little more often.