“Hey,” came the call from across the street.
I know this beckoning. It won’t snare me. Besides, it’s dark, I have a right to be leery. Just then, a woman screamed. I turned to look.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?”
Blammo! He’s a dusky white man missing his front teeth, and he’s not small. I don’t have it in me to turn away now. The scream? Nothing. It came from the street corner, and it was a laugh.
“You live in Little Rock?”
Zing! It wasn’t a real question but a trick. He doesn’t care where I live.
“You know where the bus station is?”
Sure I do, but so does he. He says the Greyhound station has an $8 ticket to Conway with his name on it. He knows that much. Could I help him with $2? I open my wallet, hand him a couple bills.
Actually, no, he needs $5.50, but “I don’t ask for the full amount because people get scared off if
you tell them you need five dollars.”
Or if they smell booze on your breath? I want to ask. Does that spoil the close?
“Sorry,” I tell him, “but God bless you.”
That sentiment carries an inscrutable amount of cred on the street. Not this time.
“Come on,” he says. “I have a family. I have a job. I have my papers to show you.”
I cross the street.
In October, the 25 curbsite donation boxes meant to sideline panhandling downtown turned three years old.
The anniversary is significant. The boxes, collectively called Change for the Better, were funded by three-year sponsorships that came from more than two dozen companies and organizations totaling $14,700 — an initial public offering, if you will.
In the first six months, the boxes took in $421.39. After one year, $811.69 was collected. Over the next two years and several months, less than a thousand was added to that for a grand total today of $1,747.65.
Of the more than two dozen sponsors who signed on three years ago, not one has re-upped.
How come this failed? There’s no evidence panhandling has decreased. Sharon Priest, director of the Downtown Partnership, the nonprofit that collects what little money comes in monthly, says in the last year “it’s gotten worse, [or] we’re certainly getting more complaints about it.”
Who thought a few donation boxes would sideline aggressive panhandling in the first place? What curbside donation experiment in another city gave rise to such faith?
And if not this, what?
The story I relayed at the top begs a basic question. How come I gave? I don’t normally. The answer’s simple, and it contravenes everything Change for the Better stands for.
I gave him the money for the same reason you do — he confronted me. He asked for it. That’s something little orange boxes don’t do.
Scientists and researchers Daniel Oppenheimer and Chris Olivola published a book two years ago called The Science of Giving. In it, they come to some surprising conclusions about the nature of charity.
They say the most effective inducement for giving is pity, not altruism, and not idealism. Show us a pitiable face — a hungry child, a bald-headed cancer sufferer, a pound puppy — and we’ll show you the money.
In one experiment they cite, researchers passed around a picture of a hopeless case, a heartrending person, and asked for pledges. They did the same thing in a second group only along with the picture of hopelessness they added some helpful statistics, compelling data meant to frame the widespread ravages of this particular condition. The first group contributed more generously.
That’s right. The data intended to strengthen the need for charity mucked up the moment of giving.
Pity is so compelling, the authors also report, that if fundraisers include a harrowing exercise to make the donors feel bad for themselves, donations go up. This is how 5-kilometer races to raise money for breast cancer, or high-rise stair-climbing ordeals for the American Lung Association, work. People are more likely to give in the face of suffering, even their own.
Change for the Better was introduced in a little sidewalk ceremony Sept. 30, 2008, presided over by Mayor Mark Stodola. Today, he says that despite appearances, the boxes are not meant to curb panhandling. They’re more like an installation art project. People walk by and see them and they’re interactive-you can slip bills or change into the slot, but the real intent is to gently remind downtown professionals and visitors of the invisible need in our larger community. So these boxes don’t replace person-to-person transactions in theory, but in practice, if they compete with panhandlers for the same loose change and occasional bills, well, that’s the free market for you.
“Putting some boxes up downtown was never going to deter panhandling,” Stodola said, but to “give people who feel sympathetic toward people who panhandle another approach on how to give.
“People are very sympathetic when they get approached, but the question remains, are they really going to go buy food or are they going to go down to the liquor store and buy a pint?”
The money collected by Change for the Better is dispersed to five agencies, Friendly Chapel, Our House, River City Ministries, The Salvation Army and the Union Rescue Mission/Dorcas House.
Priest says the concept here in Little Rock was all Judi Casavechia’s. She’s now at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences but then was director of Southside Main Street. Casavechia got the idea partly from information she’d heard coming out of Denver, which in 2005 enacted a 10-year plan to end homelessness.
Today, there are about two dozen or more cities with some version of Change for the Better, but Denver is still one of the best, where about 80 boxes went up in 2007 and raised as much as $100,000 annually. Not only that, but Amber Callender, director of one of the city’s leading homeless advocacy and assistance nonprofits, Road Home, told USA Today in 2010 that the effort has sharply curtailed panhandling on at least one main strip.
Here’s a caveat, though. Fully $70,000 of the “donations” Denver planners boast actually come from sponsorships, a ratio reflected to a lesser degree in Little Rock’s experiment, where just $1,747.65 was collected but fully $14,700 was solicited from sponsors.
Still, the Denver commission on homelessness has leveraged about $50 million public and private dollars and built about 2,300 units of permanent supportive housing, linked about 5,700 to employment and job training, and prevented about 5,800 families from becoming homeless with eviction assistance, said Jamie Bradley, spokeswoman for Road Home.
Bradley says the change agent provided by Better Way to Give, Denver’s version of Change for the Better, is pretty small within the context of the city’s total effort to end homelessness by 2015. So here’s another point of comparison.
A year after Change for the Better began the city of Cleveland converted 13 parking meters over to change boxes. With half as many units as Little Rock, residents dumped about $100 a week there. Today, said Mark Lammon, special projects manager of the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, that’s dropped to about $75 a month.
Still, Cleveland’s cited their change meters in grant proposals the alliance has won. These grants are used to transport homebound folks to and from doctor’s appointments and process new birth certificates and identification cards, a surprisingly common obstacle to secure housing. “We’ve actually been able to leverage the meters and get grant money, so the fund is a lot larger than what the meters bring in.”
When Lammon’s alliance was formed just six years ago, one of its core responsibilities for revitalizing downtown was to kill or curb panhandling. A rough survey of alliance “ambassadors” — paid street cleaners — over time evinced a 40 percent decline in witnessed incidents of panhandling.
In Denver, more than half — about 60 percent — of the city’s surveyed homeless population are families.
“They’re not the ones you see panhandling on the streets,” Bradley said.
Casavechia’s research while founding Change for the Better pointed to the same conclusion: Aggressive panhandlers and the homeless are not the same populations.
“The majority of people asking for money on the street aren’t homeless. Also, the homeless don’t like people who do that. That’s what we learned in our research. We really wanted to teach the public that when you hand out this money to someone who’s asking, you’re really just increasing the problem.”
That’s the education Casavechia, Priest and Stodola intended. Early on, business cards had been
designed for the public that read, in effect, I’m not giving to you but I have given, and here are places you can go for help.
“That never really took off,” Casavechia said.
Handing a card like that to a panhandler must feel a little like giving out toothbrushes to trick-or-treaters.
It’s still disingenuous to say panhandling wasn’t a driving motivation for the boxes. One of the long-term goals is to break the cycle of street-level giving, which would surely run panhandlers off.
“I have been asked for money, and no, I don’t give it,” Casavechia said, “because I understand the cycle. I have a nonprofit background, and you do not give to people walking up to you on the street where you don’t know where it goes to.
“Give your money to programs where you know how it’s used. That [applies] no matter where you give to.”
So, then, what will break the cycle?
In 1999, Sweden implemented a novel approach to curb prostitution. They stopped prosecuting the purveyors — the women — and started arresting the customers. That is, they decriminalized the selling of sex. They actually made it okay to sell sex, just illegal to buy it.
Why not try a similar approach with panhandling?
Today, a state statute says it’s illegal to loiter for the purpose of panhandling. That’s the verbiage. If a beat cop witnesses someone panhandling, they can cite them. If the beat cop doesn’t hear the pitch but asks the giver if she was asked for money, and the giver concedes, the cop can cite the panhandler.
If the law were rewritten so the citation went to the giver, the burden of refusing a sidewalk solicitation falls on the party least happy about the commerce, a person with perhaps a longer record of civil obedience than the panhandler.
That is, the burden of not giving is squarely on the shoulders of the person not inclined to give.
No one spoken to for this story thought that was a good idea.
“You’re going to cite them for what? For being sympathetic?” said Stodola, the former prosecutor.
“It would be so controversial,” Priest said.
“Go and arrest a person for doing something that they think is a kind act by helping what appears
to be a homeless person?” Little Rock police Lt. Terry Hastings asked. “Good luck on getting that
passed!”
The department, the spokesman said, uncategorically, wouldn’t support it.
“That’s what America is all about — helping others.”
Originally published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 12 Feb 2012.
