Dual-Purpose Benches: Sheltering the homeless one bench at a time -Ruth Kinyua

         

            Two years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Lisa, CEO at Dignity Village in Northeast Portland. The purpose of my interview was to determine how my team's class project would provide feasible shelter solutions for the homeless population, a matter that had already drawn much attention to the City's handling of the Spring Water Corridor concerns in August 2016. 

 Following my interview with Lisa, my team and I were tasked with generating ideas that would help us create a prototype of a homeless shelter. Although we had initially expected to create solutions that would benefit the entire homeless community, but our subsequent research and interviews shifted our focus to accommodate the needs of individual homeless people. 

          One of the emphases during this University Studies class (Design Thinking), was to ensure that solutions were focused on the user, financially feasible, and visually appealing. A foremost  challenge that we encountered in presenting our solutions was the resistance to providing yet another solution to make the homeless population more comfortable, rather than preventing homelessness in the first place. However, following our interview with Lisa, we identified key issues that helped shift our focus from the macro sphere of homelessness, to the micro sphere, focusing on providing a shelter that met the need of one homeless person at a time. One of the issues that Lisa reported was the rate of unreported violence that occurred among the homeless. Especially because Lisa (and her husband) had been homeless prior to finding shelter at their current home, she recounted firsthand accounts on the impact of homelessness on women who could not find a place to sleep. Our solution for the individual homeless individual was then birthed from a need to  provide consistent nightly shelters for particularly vulnerable individuals within the homeless community. Given that our shelters would be integrated into already existing benches, we considered that they were financially feasible and suitable for nightly use. 

        It was not long before the end of the term (during the December 2016 Winter), that I encountered a group of men warming themselves by a fire lit over an icy pavement and realized how critical our bench shelters would have been to their survival. Although our solution was focused on individuals, homelessness is a concern that must be addressed on a community level.
In the City of Portland, the Welcome Home Coalition leverages grassroots networks and formative research to create an infrastructure for more affordable homes.