So last night as I was leaving Total Wine and More, I was stopped by this older homeless man who asked me for a dollar for a bus ride. I told him of course I would help him out and handed him a $10 bill. As I walked away he called out to me and told me that there was some piece of paper with the bill. I told him that it was for him.

I have avoided talking about this before, but I think I’ll finally explain what went on in that exchange. You see, I have a personal solution for how I deal with homeless people that approach me. I feel like just giving a dollar is really just the cost of clearing your own conscience of the discomfort of dealing with someone who is experiencing total depravity; we are just paying to push them back into the comfortable peripherals of our minds. It’s like they have taken ransom of our comfort and we’ll bribe them to go disappear so we can move on with our lives.
I just can’t accept that kind of action personally. For me, I either need to not engage with them at all, or make a conscious effort to leave them better off than when I first saw them. So what I have been doing for the past couple of years is keeping a $20 bill in my wallet earmarked to give to the next homeless person who approaches me directly. I don’t judge them and evaluate their worthiness, but my simple metric to control the frequency is that they have to actually approach me (obviously I don’t walk around downtown Seattle that often).

Why do I give $20 (ya I don’t know why last night I only had a $10 but oh well)? Because $20 buys me attention; it breaks the mental schema of our interaction. Nobody is out giving $20, so when someone gives you $20 (especially from a broke college student) you are forced to take notice. Now that I have their attention, it allows me the opportunity to speak into their lives and provide encouragement that they otherwise would be numb to. But since I struggle with a bit of social anxiety, I have decided to write out my encouragement. I’ll fold a piece of paper and stuff into the fold of the bill and it’ll usually just be something simple as “This is an investment in you. Where you have been doesn’t control your future. Let this be a simple reminder that you’re not alone.”

Again, that isn’t anything that profound, but when paired with the unprecedented gift, it can have the opportunity to be more meaningful. It shows a level of intentionality and preserves a bit of their humanity that is usually lost.

So why am I sharing this? Well, when I drove off, I passed by the homeless man after he had read the note and he was just looking up to the sky with an emotional expression with his arms up in the air. Now I’m pretty sure he was strung out during this exchange and I have no idea if he has any memory of what happened last night or that I provided any real help to him, but that moment clarified something for me that I had always sensed but I don’t think ever explicitly acknowledged before.

What I have come to realize is that we have a flawed understanding of the varying cost that social impact has. What I mean is: We think the exchange rate of money towards social impact is static; that the level of impact we hope to achieve is clearly defined and the more impact we desire has an equally increasing economic cost. But I don’t think that is the case.

I’ll give a quick second example that is a little bit more clear. Earlier this week I went to the Seattle Social Venture Fast Pitch final competition and a guy stood up there and shared his story about how he used to be homeless. He then held up a quarter and talked about how someone gave him a quarter and told him to call home and later claimed that that quarter saved his life and helped him turn his life around to now be standing on stage to pitch a business idea to help other homeless people ( wecount.org ). Now here is the question: what was the social impact of that quarter? Exponentially impactful! That quarter created incredibly more social/economic/emotional/relational impact than can be quantified. Yes, it would eventually take much more money and time from social workers and tax payers to help this man move from that quarter to standing on stage, but without that quarter, none of that future investment wouldn’t have yielded anything.

Now here’s a question: If this guy was able to track down that person that gave him the quarter and told them how that changed his life, how do you think that person would feel? Would that not be the greatest investment of that person’s life? How much would you pay to change someone’s life?

I know I kind of rambled here, but I hope this thesis point is clear: benevolence and compassion given to the right person at the right place at the right time can produce a life changing impact. You don’t have to invest a lot of money to make a positive change. Sometimes all it takes a quarter and smile to change the course of the future.