They said, "it is difficult to get assistance/help" - from affluent area/region.
- I was puzzled.
- Later on, I found out..what they told me was true/accurate.
Not much help from there.
I can understand this.
A ministry to the homeless gains a lot of expertise over time as to what is necessary in order to help.
Affluent areas don't have the volume of clients you would need to build that expertise. Helping without that expertise is very discouraging because nothing changes in the homeless person's life. They just burn through your resources and are no better off. They need mentoring on how to fix their broken thinking.
My sister is involved in ministering to children from severely dysfunctional homes. She introduced an initiative at her church where people volunteer to be mentors to a child and visit them at the school for an hour or so once per week. It's a program that has been set up and standardized by some people experienced in this ministry that can be replicated and rolled out by other churches.
Her materials said that every time a child has a positive interaction with an adult, a connection in their brain forms. They need multiple connections to be formed each day or else when they mature they are missing these connections and it affects their ability to think for the future. This is one reason why poverty can be generational. A child raised in dysfunction and without positive parenting is missing a piece of intellect that couldn't form during his upbringing. Their thinking wants to consume their resources for the moment rather than planning for the next step.
Once she told me about this aspect I realized that was what we were seeing. Our help was being consumed but not applied for the next step.
We've had to give some tough love over this. One example is that we put a dear sister in Christ up for two weeks in a hotel - one week to recover from an assault, and another week while on the waiting list for a shelter. After the second week we told her to call in the morning to get her spot at the shelter that had come available (we confirmed they had a spot). The next morning she called but she hung up every time she was put on hold, until when her call finally got through all of the spots were gone. We had already invested at least $1,000 in her needs and she had several times done things that didn't help herself, like abandon half of the diapers we had given her, throw away some of the clothes we had given her etc. She had about $150 in cash from her paycheck when we paid for her hotel for the second week. We left her with food, her money (of course) but she also had food stamps and WIC. She spent the week in the hotel not even using the breakfast buffet or the food we left but instead spending her last $170 on restaurant food and junk food.
When the week was over and she hadn't secured her spot at the shelter, she didn't even have bus money left. I had put some money on her bus card earlier (which she also mostly wasted), but there was enough money left that she could ride the bus all night to stay warm. We did not step in to buy another hotel night, even though she and her baby were on the street, because she needed to understand the outcome of her bad planning. Around 11:30 pm my son was so worried about her that he called the shelter and asked if they could at all take her in - that she was currently on the streets with a baby. They made an exception we aren't aware of them making before (they want to do intake work and the social workers are not there at night), and said if she called they would let her in. She did, so my son sent an uber to her bus stop to bring her to the shelter. If the shelter hadn't taken her, he was going to go find her and let her sleep on his couch - he just didn't have the stomach for a baby to be homeless.
And the ending to that chapter of the story illustrates why affluent people's help can be enabling rather than helping if they give the kind of help someone with a thought process like theirs would put to good use. And, helping that way is discouraging because you just gain a dependent rather than actually helping someone.
The next chapter of this dear sister in Christ's story still had some very poor decision making, but she is slowly moving towards self reliance. The journey takes a long time and has mis steps. It similar to the process of raising a child. Restoring broken thinking takes time and mentoring. There will be failures in their thinking and behavior as they are learning a new way of life (planning for tomorrow), but there doesn't have to be failures in your loving on them.