Solving a System vs. Helping One Person

I’ve written dozens of articles about the power of systems thinking and its applicability to homelessness. To be clear, I am 100% committed to the idea that homelessness is a complex system, and it requires systemic solutions. And at the same time, while I know this to be true intellectually, emotionally, it often doesn’t feel like enough. And that insufficiency has gotten me thinking a lot about the difference between “being right” and “doing the right thing”. They’re not always the same thing.

Following Your Heart

Over the course of the 10 years that I have been working to end homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have gone from working on the front lines of this issue — doing outreach in encampments, coordinating resource fairs, helping people get jobs — to now having an almost exclusively policy-oriented position in local government.

On one hand, I am now in a position to actually implement the systemic solutions I espouse, but on another, unless I really carve out the time, I am farther removed than ever from the human connection that drew me to this work in the first place.