Why relationships matter for our unhoused neighbors
A Q&A with Kevin F. Adler, CEO of Miracle Messages and author of "When We Walk By"
This week, we are sharing a Q&A we hosted with Kevin F. Adler, the founder and CEO of Miracle Messages, a nonprofit that helps people experiencing homelessness rebuild their social support systems. Kevin is also the author of When We Walk By, which was just published last week. We sat down with him to learn more about the importance of narrative change, his experience building Miracle Messages, and the power of relationships for our unhoused neighbors.
These days, a lot of the conversation about isolation and loneliness seems to focus on the middle class and above (e.g., “join a club!” “play pickleball!”). Kevin refocuses our attention on the urgent need for family, community, and connection among those who are most on the fringes of our society.
We hope you enjoy the Q&A. And if you’re inspired by Kevin’s words, please consider picking up a copy of the book or volunteering for Miracle Messages’ phone buddy program.
- Sam
Sam: For our readers who don’t already know about the good work of Miracle Messages, can you share a little bit about what you do and how it works?
Kevin: Miracle Messages is a nonprofit that helps people who are experiencing homelessness rebuild their social support systems and financial security. We believe that relational poverty is a form of poverty that gets overlooked. It’s the isolation, loneliness, and disconnectedness. It’s the stigma and the shame that accompanies it. It’s the lack of resources that are invested in people who are disconnected.
Today, we offer three programs to address this type of relational poverty that comes with experiencing homelessness. First, we offer family and friend reunification services for folks who are unhoused and want to reconnect to a family member or friend they may not have seen in a while. We will record them a video message, audio message, written message, or however else the message gets to us. We then have a network of volunteer digital detectives who make phone calls and do digital searches to help locate our unhoused neighbors’ loved ones, deliver messages, and help reunite families. This has resulted in over 800 family reunifications.
But we also know that for some people, family is part of the problem, not the solution. That leads to Miracle Friends, our phone buddy program. We have over 300 active pairs of volunteers around the world who have committed to 20-30 minutes per week to have 1-to-1 phone calls or text messages with an unhoused neighbor. Through those conversations, we heard from volunteers, “I love this person. We trust each other. We’re friends. But it’s hard to be on equal footing if they don’t know what they’re gonna eat tonight. Can we get money for them so that they can have a baseline quality of life?”
This led us to create the first basic income pilot for individuals experiencing homelessness in the country. Initially, we just raised $50,000 on social media, selected 14 individuals who were nominated by their volunteer friends, and gave out $500 a month for 6 months with no strings attached. Within six months, two-thirds of the people who were unhoused at the time of the first payment were able to secure housing. They used the money better than we could have used it for them. Today, we have expanded into a $2.1 million randomized control trial funded by Google.org and in partnership with USC.
Why did you start Miracle Messages in the first place? How has your relationship to the work evolved over time?
I had an uncle, Uncle Mark, who lived on the streets of Santa Cruz for 30 years. I never thought of him as a homeless person, just a beloved member of my family. It wasn’t until he passed away at 50, by himself in a transitional housing unit, that I started thinking, “You know, everyone I’m walking by, that’s someone’s son or daughter, someone’s brother or sister, someone’s kid.” I wanted to build my own compassion and empathy to extend to my neighbors in a way that I wasn’t exercising.
I started out by trying to understand the experiences of my unhoused neighbors. I invited 24 people experiencing homelessness over the course of the year to wear GoPro cameras around their chest and narrate their experiences of life living on the streets. The basic premise was, I walk by you, but you’re still here. What’s it like to be you? What is it that you wished passers by like me knew? I watched dozens of hours of footage. It was heartbreaking. You saw people constantly pitied, scorned, and ignored. In one clip, I heard someone say, “I never realized I was homeless when I lost my housing, only when I lost my family and my friends.” This was a light bulb moment. It illuminated an experience of homelessness that I never thought of before, but it’s intuitive.
In response, I took a walk down Market Street in San Francisco, approached everyone I saw who was visibly homeless, and asked, “Do you have any family or friends that you want to reconnect with?” The first guy I met was Jeffrey, who hadn’t seen his family in 22 years. I sat down, recorded a short video to his niece, nephew, sister, and dad. I go home that night, find a Facebook group connected to his hometown, and post a video with a short note.
Within an hour, that video was shared hundreds of times. It made the local news. Classmates start commenting and offering support saying, “I went to high school with Jeffrey. I work in construction. Does he need a job?” And within 20 minutes of the post, his sister gets tagged. We get on the phone the next day and she tells me that Jeffrey had been a missing person for 12 years. Within a week they had a phone call to reunite, then they reconnected in-person later that year. That was the starting point. I thought, Jeffrey, wasn't the only one, and this shouldn't be happening. That was the first Miracle Messages reunion and I started doing this work full-time.
That has to be one of the craziest founding stories I’ve ever heard.
There’s this other part of the story I don’t share much. For the next three months, there wasn’t another reunion, and it wasn’t because people were saying no. It’s because I was so dubious, not so much of the need, but of my ability to meet the need. Who am I? What am I getting into? Is this the right thing to do?
I ended up visiting Saint Anthony’s in San Francisco, which offers a lot of support for the unhoused population. The leadership let me come in, make an announcement, and then go around at the lunch line and see if anyone is interested. I did that, but in the back of my mind, I was secretly hoping that no one would take me up on the offer. Initially, no one did. And just as I was walking out of the church, this guy came up to me and asked, “Are you doing this reunion thing? I haven’t seen my family in 30 years. Can you help me?” There was a moment in my mind where I’m thinking, “Shit!” But I responded with, “Yes!” That ended up being Johnny. I recorded a message to his family, posted it online and on Instagram, one of his family members got tagged, and within three weeks all of his brothers and sisters flew to San Francisco to meet with him in a hotel room. I’m sitting there with him at the reunion, and he looks me in my eyes and says, “Thank you for giving me my family back.”
Wow. That’s an incredible start. Fast forward to today and you’ve been running Miracle Messages for nearly a decade. And this month, you decided to publish a new book, When We Walk By. Why write a book now? How do you see it complementing Miracle Messages’ efforts?
Hearing these stories, I felt that if you can start showcasing them as a collection—not just like story after story, but really the context in which those stories emerge—you can start to tell a broader systemic and societal narrative. You can tell a story about the structural systems: housing, criminal justice, racism. You can also tell the story of the systems of our shared humanity: relational poverty and isolation, loneliness, stigmatization, hyperindividualism. I felt strongly that I had received the gift of these stories entrusted to me, and it was my responsibility to share those stories in a context that reflects how they’ve transformed my heart and thinking.
The conversation around homelessness in this country is at a fever pitch. The main debate seems to be between people who are saying, “Homeless services are failing miserably, look how much money has been spent and how little we have to show for it.” Which is mostly true. It’s a mess. And then the other side of the debate is responding, “No, homeless services do not create homelessness. There are all these systemic issues.” Which is also true.
What is missed in this back-and-forth is that there’s a third thing going on, and that’s the shared humanity bit. All of the conversation is about “them,” it’s never about “us.” We have to look squarely in the mirror and ask, “Why have we allowed these systems to continue to be broken? Why don’t we care enough to fight everyday to consider how the people affected by these systems are our loved ones?” It’s probably because we don’t see them that way. We don’t see them, as my shirt says, “somebody’s someone.” We see them as problems to be solved. This is a homegrown problem, your homeless neighbors were once your housed neighbors.
I’ve heard you talk a lot about this “us” versus “them” dynamic, particularly as it relates to those experiencing homelessness. What have you seen as the primary barriers to connection between housed and unhoused neighbors? How have you seen these barriers overcome?
The primary cause of the “”us versus them” dichotomy is that we don’t know who “they” are. We all care about homelessness. Anytime I ask a classroom, “Raise your hand if you care about this issue,” every hand goes up. But if I ask, “How many of you know someone who is currently experiencing homelessness?” Only like five percent of hands go up. Homelessness is such an isolating, stigmatizing experience that I, to this day, have friends in powerful places—people who have all the trappings of what we consider success in this life—who confess to me things like, “I, too, experienced homelessness, but don’t tell anyone.” It’s such a closeted experience because we made it so.
These barriers can only be overcome through direct relationships—knowing someone who is going through an experience. Doing what Bryan Stevenson talks about as “getting proximate.” You need to go even further though. You need to get relational. You also need to understand what is going on. There is research from neuroscientists at Princeton and Duke, who find that the part of our brain that activates when we see a person does not activate when we see a person who is experiencing homelessness. We are processing a human being in the same way we process an inanimate object. It’s not only willful ignorance, it is deeper than that. We need to find opportunities for more meaningful engagement with our unhoused neighbors.
It seems that this “us” versus “them” dynamic is connected to “relational poverty,” a term you mentioned a bit earlier. Can you share a little bit more about what you mean by this term? How important is social connection in helping those experiencing homelessness get back on their feet?
When we look at what people experiencing homelessness cite as the cause for how they became homeless, one in three can be interpreted as some form of relational brokenness. This could be anything from divorce, to an argument with a friend or family member you were living with, to the loss of a loved one. Even if it is more indirect, like losing a job, the first thing you’re doing isn’t going to a shelter. It’s contacting a friend or family member and seeing if they’re willing to take you in. Social capital makes the difference between those who go into homelessness and those who don’t.
If you actually go further up the pyramid—taking a step back to the group that’s not yet homeless, but is at risk of it—one out of every two Americans are a paycheck away from not being able to pay rent. When you hear stats like this, you almost have to ask, “Why aren’t there more people who are unhoused?” We’re finding that family, friends, community, and religious institutions are the support network between being housed and unhoused.
If you’re the one in three people for whom relational poverty is a contributing factor to homelessness, then think about what happens once you experience homelessness. You feel embarrassed and ashamed. In our society of rugged individualism, you see yourself as a self-made failure instead of a self-made success. When people say they want to reconnect to a loved one, and then change their mind, the number one reason they cite is, “I can’t, I feel dirty.” It’s an internalized sense of worthlessness. The isolation, disconnection, and stigmatization of homelessness is so extreme in its form, there needs to be a language tailored to it beyond low social capital or few social ties. It’s far worse than that, it’s relational impoverishment.
Some critiques of this work around social isolation and connection are that it can be “squishy.” Do you think there are limits to leveraging connection to support our unhoused neighbors?
Connection is only the “squishy” thing when we look at connection and social capital as the sole answer to solving homelessness. It’s not, that would be ridiculous. You need food, water, and shelter to be fully human. But we also need love and belonging and social support, and this often gets overlooked. Connection is only considered “squishy” if you are using it as a silver bullet or are trying to use it in a manipulative way, to almost avoid building new housing and designing other systemic solutions. It’s actually the opposite. If you get closer in proximity and care, that should prompt you to want to care enough to fix the systems because we need more housing. We need to look at the relational piece as part of a broader context. There is a reason why Housing First, a nationwide best practice around ending homelessness, is called Housing First, not Housing Only – the fifth pillar is community integration. It’s that important.
We haven’t even talked about what happens if you get housed and you are still isolated. Even if you get into housing, there’s a huge level of attrition back into homelessness if you don’t have the social support network. You’re isolated. Now, there are still problems that are coming up in your life. How do you resolve them? Do you have someone to go through life with? I don’t think, at any point, we age out of the need to have someone who goes to bed at night and wakes up in the morning thinking of our well-being who isn’t a case worker or social worker. It’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.
Homelessness in the U.S. feels like one of those deeply intractable societal challenges. Do you ever have days where you just want to give up? What gives you hope, or keeps you going, as you enter your 10th year doing this work?
I believe in people. I have seen people transform and grow over time in their views on issues. Think about LGBTQ+ rights in this country, we have had tremendous progress over the past decade. So much of the focus in homelessness is on housing. We need to take a moment to ask why we haven’t built the housing needed to house our moms, dads, brothers, and sisters. It's because we don’t yet see them that way yet. But we’ve seen this change happen within our own volunteer ranks at Miracle Messages. We have a person who drives ambulances as a paramedic. He emailed us after being in our phone buddy program and said, “I have never seen people experiencing homelessness as anything other than problems, because I’m picking them up at moments of extreme need and bringing them to the hospital. I hated my job until being in relationship with my phone buddy. I want to thank you for that opportunity.”
Hearts and minds can be changed on this issue. I feel more hopeful and optimistic on this issue now—way more than 10 years ago—because I’ve seen people get off the streets, I’ve seen lives transformed. I have friends who started as unhoused neighbors who are now my housed neighbors. If it can work for so many in our community, then there’s no reason it can’t work for others.