Fundraiser!

Come on out and FEEL THE LOVE!

• Saturday, February 13, 9pm - ???
• Spring4th Center
• Four bands:
  • Buffalo Bangers
  • Magic Apron
  • Club Awesome
  • The Orphins

$8 suggested donation a the door - come out , have fun, and support a good cause! Keep current at our Facebook Event page

ManKind Project

ManKind Project builds a hut!

SAVE THE DATE: Feb 13

We're throwing a benefit concert! More info coming soon...

Big Change

Another email recently sent out on the list:

We have a problem. For the past several years, our organization has built around 18 shelters a year - and that's where we've topped out. Basically, we have too few volunteers doing too much work. In response, we've decided to try something new.

What separates the Mad Housers from traditional sheltering organizations isn't the construction, but the outreach - we find our clients and help them where they are, as they are. This outreach is critical to our mission, and the most difficult part of what we do. However, we don't spend the bulk of our efforts on outreach, but instead on construction. True, the construction takes time and effort, but it's a well-known process that's been refined, tested, and documented extensively. It's the easy part.

So, starting in 2010, we're going to focus on the hard part and work with others to provide the easy part. For years, we've had outside groups - Scout troops, churches, service organizations, grade school and college classrooms, and the like - offer to build structures. Generally, we've fit them in when we could as a sideline to our main operations. Now we hope to make working with these groups a central part of our operations.

Hopefully, this will have several positive effects. First, it gives us more time to work on the outreach side of the equation - finding new clients, supporting existing clients, and getting services to our clients to help them leave the huts. Second, this also expands the educational and advocacy aspects of our mission, as groups of new people are exposed to our ideas and methods. Third, these outside groups can themselves be a source of referrals for clients, volunteers, and donors.

What's the downside? Well, if you're a casual Mad Houser volunteer, there will be fewer volunteer-only builds to attend. Don't worry - there will never be a time where we don't build! But from the Mad Housers point of view, building by itself is not enough. Our job is not to build, it's to help. A building without people is just a shell.

This is not a decision made casually, and it will not be implemented abruptly. Over the next few years, we plan to gradually expand the total number of shelters built, and increase the percentage of those shelters built by outside groups. Our first few joint efforts are bound to be a little chaotic. But there's a time to stop planning and simply go forwards and learn along the way - and as anyone who's attend a build knows, we're not afraid of making mistakes! We'll learn, and improve, and in a few years we'll be helping more people in a better fashion.

The Board started discussing this idea back in May, went over it - along with several other notions - over the course of several meetings spanning several months. We voted it in right before Thanksgiving. It's a pretty radical change for us, since we've always have been focused on making the huts, but we realized that it's more important that huts are made than we make the huts. If this works the way we hope it does, it'll be well worth the change.

Awesome video

This video essay was done by Amanda Gardner (www.agardnerphoto.wordpress.com). Thanks, Amanda!

Another email

In response to a person who wrote asking what sort of design help the Mad Housers could use. My edited response:

The Mad Housers have long tried to balance between the issues of 'more' and 'better' when it comes to shelter. Given a limited (VERY limited) amount of resources, do we want to make fewer, better shelters or more, skimpier shelters?

Until recently, we've been mostly on the 'more' side - most of our design changes have been the type that help improve the longevity of the shelters (roof overhangs) or give great improvement at little additional cost (hi hats). However, our our Board is now beginning to think that certain quality-of-life improvements may help with the longevity of the camp as a whole. Simply put, if we start making additional investments in things that aren't directly shelter, such as building toilets or adding solar electrification, the quality of the camp may help convince outsiders that we're a net benefit to the community. Currently, even the best-run homeless camps are dicey propositions at best. Anything we can do to improve a camp's chances of survival should be considered.

So there's our challenge: right now, we're focused 100% on basic shelter. What other things can we do to make an encampment a better place to live? Once we start looking at things beyond simple shelter, there are lots of needs that our clients have. Hygiene. Communication. Transportation. Power. Storage. Food preparation. Community.

Here are our design constraints:

• It should be a capital improvement, not an ongoing service. In other words, we can build a woodshed, but we're not going to start up firewood delivery.
• It needs to be buildable by volunteers using ordinary tools and off-the-shelf materials.
• It cannot be fixed to the ground. Our shelters sit on cinder blocks, which make them chattel property. If we were to pour a foundation, we would start crossing a number of laws.
• It should give us maximum bang for our buck. Currently, one of our huts costs about $500 to build; this makes us the cheapest secure shelter solution that I've yet found. (If you can find a better one, please let us know!) Our total yearly budget is around $10,000. So a project that costs $4000 would be a huge investment of our budget that would otherwise shelter 8 people - it would have to be pretty compelling!
• Anything that requires ongoing maintenance should be maintainable by our clients. For example, we've frequently discussed building composting toilets. But who's going to service them? We're fairly certain that the first time someone gets sick in a potty, nobody will clean it, and it'll go downhill from there.

So you can see, it's a challenging problem. You could pick just about any area and work with it. What interests you?

Email

We've received some interesting emails lately, and I thought the responses might make for interesting blog posts. One volunteer wrote in recently offering several observations:

• Frequently, it seems like volunteers stand around a lot waiting for things to happen.  Perhaps we could split into smaller teams to work on separate things...?
• Second, oftentimes panel loading seems chaotic, and items have been left behind at the warehouse. Checklists...?
• Third, why aren't we soliciting for volunteers more aggressively?

All good questions. Here's my somewhat edited response:

Yes, there's definitely an art to splitting up tasks to keep everyone engaged.

For instance, we could paint the panels before we leave the warehouse, but in general we don't. Why? Because out in the field, there's usually a period where, in terms of construction, only one or two people can be building. Instead of having folks standing around, it's better to leave off the painting at the warehouse so that folks can paint in the field, even if that seems to take more time in the field.  

The problem is, you generally get to be a build leader by knowing how to build a shelter, but that winds up being only part of the skillset of directing a team to build a shelter. Hell, I've been building huts for 15 years and I still sometimes wind up having folks idling. In general, we try to keep everyone occupied, but sometimes we slip up, and sometimes circumstances wind up making it impossible. But we can't have new build leaders become good build leaders until they're done, sadly, being not-so-good build leaders.

In terms of the loading situation - we are now implementing checklists, so that's better, but the Board realizes that this is right now one of the biggest bottlenecks that we have at a build.   We're setting a shoot-for-the-moon goal of having our load time for a shelter deploy thinned down to 15 minutes. That's going to require some high organization and out-of-the-box thinking, especially for circumstances where half the team doesn't know their way around the warehouse. But even if it only goes to 20 minutes, that'll still be a vast improvement.

And in terms of getting new recruits... well, there's something big in the works. Watch this space!