BUT WE STILL DON"T GET IT

BUT WE STILL DON'T GET IT.

And before anybody misunderstands me, let me be very clear: I am not angry because people are helping children. I am angry because I am afraid we have forgotten how to see everybody else. And underneath that anger is grief. There is genuine sadness in realizing that we can look directly at people who are literally living in the trenches of poverty, homelessness, housing insecurity, mental-health crises, and social isolation—and somehow allow them to disappear from our collective field of concern. I don't want to stop anybody from giving a child a backpack. Give the backpack. Give the school supplies. Help the single mother. Support the family. But then look up. Look around. Because the children aren't the only people in our communities who need us. Our elderly neighbors need us. Our homeless and unhoused neighbors need us.

People struggling with mental health need us. Working people who cannot afford housing need us. Families one missed paycheck away from eviction need us. People who are employed but still cannot afford the basic cost of living need us. And here's where my frustration becomes anger: Why aren't we demanding the same level of sponsorship, partnership, creativity, and organizational energy around those problems? I'm seeing organizations receive sponsorships and resources to conduct backpack and school-supply drives—and again, I am not opposed to that work. But what if we started asking sponsors for more? What if, when a corporation says, "We want to support the community," our organizations responded: "Great. What are you willing to do about homelessness?" "What are you willing to do about housing insecurity?" "What are you willing to do for our elderly residents?" "What are you willing to do for mental-health access?" "What are you willing to do for people who are working and still cannot afford to live here?"

What if nonprofit organizations stopped thinking only about what they can independently organize and started asking: Who can we partner with to solve something bigger than any one organization can solve alone? Because that's where I think we're missing something. We're confusing charity with civic responsibility. Charity can be a beautiful thing. But civic responsibility asks harder questions. It asks: What is actually preventing this person from thriving? And sometimes the answer isn't another giveaway. Sometimes the answer is access. Think about our children. We're getting ready to send them back to school with backpacks, pencils, notebooks, and supplies. Good. But what happens when a child is missing required immunizations or documentation and encounters a barrier to school enrollment or attendance? What good is the backpack if the child can't get through the door? Where are our community clinics? Where are the school partnerships? Where are the mobile health initiatives? Where are the organizations saying: "Before school starts, let's help families get their children's health records and required immunizations in order." That's what I mean by proactivity. Don't wait for the crisis. Look at the system around the crisis. Find the barrier. Find the partner. Find the resource. Solve something. Because we have the capacity to do this. We have nonprofits. We have churches. We have community centers. We have schools. We have clinics. We have hospitals. We have businesses.

We have corporations with sponsorship dollars. We have volunteers. We have people with expertise. And now we have technology capable of helping us organize information, identify needs, communicate, and mobilize faster than ever. So why are we still organizing like we're working in silos? Why are we competing for visibility when we could be coordinating for impact? Why are we producing another flyer when we could be producing a community response system? And yes, I'm going to say something else that may make people uncomfortable: Public imagery is not the same thing as public impact. A beautiful flyer doesn't equal civic engagement. A packed event doesn't automatically equal community transformation. A photograph of a child receiving a backpack doesn't tell us whether that child's family has stable housing three months from now. A giveaway doesn't tell us whether an elderly resident has enough food next week. And an event doesn't tell us whether the person sleeping outside tonight has somewhere safe to go tomorrow.

That's the part that breaks my heart. Because homelessness is not theoretical. Housing insecurity is not theoretical. Poverty is not theoretical. Mental-health struggles are not theoretical. These are human beings. People we pass. People we work beside. People who raised us. People who are raising our children. People who are trying desperately to remain housed. People who work full-time yet still cannot afford a place to live. People who are one emergency away from losing everything. And while we're celebrating another successful giveaway, somebody else may be sleeping outside tonight. How did we become okay with that? I have been asking that question personally. I've had a campaign running for almost a year simply trying to go into the community and provide basic supplies to people who are homeless and unhoused. Not a gala. Not an elaborate production. Not a complicated program. Just people going where people are and providing something useful. As of today, that campaign has received twenty dollars. Twenty. And I don't say that to shame anybody. I say it because it made me stop and think.

What does our response to that $20 tell us about what we are willing to see? Because maybe the problem isn't that people don't care. Maybe we've become conditioned to respond to the needs that are easiest to understand, organize around, and photograph. Children going back to school? Everybody understands that. Homelessness? That's uncomfortable. Housing insecurity? That's complicated. Mental health? That's complicated. An elderly person living alone? That's easy to overlook. A working adult who cannot afford housing? That challenges everything we want to believe about hard work and success. Those problems require us to look deeper. They require us to collaborate. They require us to confront systems. They require us to stay after the cameras leave. And maybe that's exactly why we keep looking away. But I don't want to look away. And I don't want us to stop helping children. I want us to look wider. I want us to understand that community service should not be a competition for compassion. There is enough humanity to go around. I want us to stop asking: "What event can we organize?" And start asking: "What problem are we willing to organize ourselves around?" Because those are two completely different questions. One creates activity. The other creates civic responsibility. And civic responsibility means recognizing that the elderly person, the unhoused person, the working poor family, the person struggling with mental health, the single mother, the child, the disabled person, the immigrant, the person facing eviction—all of these people are part of the same civic body.

If one part of the community is hurting, the community has a responsibility to notice. So yes. Give the backpack. Give the school supplies. Help the children. And then keep going. Ask who else needs us. Ask who isn't being counted. Ask who isn't being photographed. Ask who doesn't have the luxury of waiting for the next giveaway. Ask who is already in the trenches. And then build partnerships around those people. Because the goal isn't to have more organizations doing more things. The goal is to have a community capable of doing the right things together. That's the shift I want to see. From charity to civic responsibility. From competition to collaboration. From visibility to impact. From seasonal service to sustained community care. From public imagery to public humanity. Because our communities don't need more spectators. They need people willing to stand in the uncomfortable places. And yeah... I said it. And I mean it. It's beyond time for us to get some real balls. Stop looking away from the things that are difficult to face.

Stop confusing activity with impact. Stop confusing visibility with service.

Look beyond the obvious.

Look deeper.

Look wider.

And start some Social Ish.