In a conversation about poverty, homelessness, and addiction, one of my colleagues said, “If there are 1,000 homeless people, there are 1,000 stories. Sometimes addiction leads to homelessness, sometimes homelessness leads to addiction. We might find themes in the stories, but each story is unique.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot. About human dignity. And about an apparent contradiction: it’s okay to be homeless, but it’s not okay to be homeless.

I know that sounds strange. Let me try to explain.

A person experiencing homelessness is not less worthy or less deserving of kindness. A person without a home is still someone’s daughter, someone’s father, someone’s friend. They’re still funny, complicated, talented, frustrating, generous, hopeful, and imperfect, just like me. Homelessness should never change the way we see someone’s humanity. But a person shouldn’t have to live without a safe, stable place to call home. And we shouldn’t accept homelessness as an inevitable part of our social landscape.

Working at the Human Development Council has made that tension hard to ignore. We spend a lot of time looking at social issues through numbers and data: how many people are experiencing homelessness, how many people are turning to food banks, how many people are living in poverty.

Those numbers matter. But behind every number is a person who needs what all of us need: safety, stability, belonging, and a place to call home.

Reducing stigma means refusing to reduce people to their circumstances. Ending homelessness means refusing to accept homelessness as inevitable. If we stigmatize homelessness, people become the problem. If we become too accustomed to homelessness, the problem itself can become invisible. We need to hold both truths. We can treat people experiencing homelessness with dignity and compassion without accepting homelessness as okay.

Kindness doesn’t require us to understand someone’s whole story. It begins with recognizing their humanity, even when we don’t know their circumstances.

And when something isn’t right, we don’t make it right by pretending it’s normal. We care. We notice. We help where we can. And we keep asking how we can make things better.

Perhaps that’s the balance we need in our communities, too. Accept the person, but don’t accept homelessness as the way things have to be.

Thanks for listening,

Andrea