What Can A Tiny House Do?

Post from one of our team members, T J Curtis.

What can a tiny house community do to help end homelessness?

When you’re first learning to ride a bike if you keep your eyes on where you are and not in front of you, you will often crash it’s only when you keep your eyes on where you’re going that you succeed. So what can a tiny house community do?

It provides a stable home; providing the security of belongings and the security of knowing where your gonna lay your head every night.

As our friends experiencing homelessness are out there in camps, sleeping on downtown streets, benches and pretty much wherever they can living life like this forces you to constantly keep your eyes on where you are. It robs you of any hope of where you’re going because it often changes nightly where you end up.

What a tiny house community can do is offer our friends stability so they can find hope. They can stop focusing on where they are and start looking forward to where they’re going. This is giving them a better success rate. Shelters are great but they are temporary solutions to an ongoing problem. A tiny house community in its whole can be a permanent solution to homelessness: providing them the needs to find trades and skills to offer jobs, providing them a sense of community, and providing them with a safe place to grow.

The idea of a tiny house community is short-term in providing transitional housing. It can be long-term in providing them with home ownership and the resources to help our friends experiencing homelessness have better long-term success. When they struggle they have a community to turn to. I understand what they’re trying to do to move the houseless off there downtown streets but moving an issue out of sight out of mind is only going to worsen their situation: adding to their problems and offering zero help!

Published by llongard

I currently serve as the North American team lead for Communitas International, a network of missional and microchurch practitioners that starts and shapes faith communities that love like Jesus in their neighborhoods. In this role, I have the privilege of working with a great team that shares in the vision of reimaging how faith communities engage in their communities to bring the tangible goodness of God to the lives of those who are marginalized and most vulnerable. Prior to this, I lead teams in Indianapolis, IN that focused on addressing the issue of homelessness in various ways. This included serving as an outreach advocate for Food 4 Souls and starting Circle City Village, a team that is working to build the first tiny house village in Indianapolis for people transitioning out of homelessness. Diakonos Community, our core community, worked with low-income apartment buildings where those transitioning out of homelessness were moved to help build community among residents and provide spiritual formation opportunities for those who desired it. I am blessed to journey through life with an amazing wife who is gifted in so many ways of her own and challenges me to keep growing every day. We also have three daughters who are beginning to blaze their own paths in the world and amaze us with their giftedness and kindness.

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