One of the things people seem to almost universally overlook when they try to make the world more equitable, solve poverty, or do some other social good (and thus part of the reason they fail) … is they just don’t seem to comprehend that step 1 is helping people solve the backlog of unresolved problems in their lives.
If you’re wanting to make the world a better place, and you’ve got something to offer people … you’ve got to understand that on the day, and by the criteria you’ve set, a hell of a lot of people:
- are in the middle of a crisis
- can’t get to your offering
- didn’t get to hear about it
… or for any number of a myriad of other reasons, simply can’t access your assistance.
For many others, your assistance has little or nothing to do with their immediate needs.
So if you’re really interested in doing social good for large numbers of people, here’s my advice:
- Set up at least one property with space for accommodation, workshops & food production;
- Find the most needy people of all, and interview every single person THOROUGHLY;
- Via such interviews, determine which of them have the greatest psychological disorders;
- If you only have one property, you need to decide whether you’re going to handle:
- Exclusively high trauma (difficult) cases;
- Exclusively low trauma (not so difficult) cases;
- A proportional mix of mostly low trauma, plus a few high trauma cases;
- (there are reasons for this I’ll explain later)
- If you have multiple properties you can deal with combinations of the above;
- Get specialists to live & work on your properties, whom can help these people;
- Make it an autonomous community not some kind of detention/internment camp;
- Get financial specialists & lawyers to settle everyone’s debts, which means most debts will simply be forgiven at 100% loss to the businesses & government agencies owed … in fact I’d argue that ONLY debts to individuals & small businesses that actually need the money should be paid, and everyone else should be told: “bad luck, you took a risk, you lost, now piss off … you have no legal right to harass these people and place them at any risk whatsoever of further loss or suffering”.
NOW you can actually get to work helping them, and helping them help themselves.
The reason why you want to segregate to some minimum degree (or completely), the high & low psychological trauma cases, is because you’re trying to help the low trauma cases, and having high trauma cases around isn’t going to help that when they already have other low trauma cases around AND their own issues to deal with. High trauma needs an entirely different set up, because I’m talking here about people whom are a potential risk to themselves & others, and they need extensive psychological help, which also means an environment built to reduce risk … and if you have multiple properties, they can graduate eventually to a low trauma property.
Aside from the aforementioned psychological counselling & therapy, you’re now able to give them access to education, creative tools & facilities, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY THE TIME to rediscover themselves over however long it takes.
These people need to walk in nature, breathe fresh air, drink clean water, witness a beautiful creature going about its day, and find a sense of self so they’re actually capable of appreciating community.
In fact, isn’t this what the whole of civilisation should be like? But what do we do instead? We wake to go to jobs we hate (if we’re lucky enough to have one), to produce products & services the world doesn’t need, and which products & services destroy the natural world because the profit motive doesn’t give a crap about preserving it beyond a few financial quarters at most. If it’s more than 2 or 3 years away, most businesses have no concern at all if the entire planet is dead.