Meeting with Tiffany and Mercedes

After today’s meeting with Tiffany and Mercedes (from The Partnership for the Homeless), I honestly feel so enlightened. That might sound a bit dramatic, but I genuinely am amazed by how much we learned from them. At the meeting, I was in charge of typing out notes, and the sheer amount of information that Mercedes could remember was almost overwhelming. In our hour-long meeting, I typed out about 7 pages of notes, nonstop––all of it incredibly helpful. Luckily, we came up with questions ahead of time because we were able to think of things that could really help our investigation.. Mercedes also knew the answer to pretty much everything, so none of those questions went to waste.

A few (OF MANY) things that we learned about the homeless population in NYC:

• In NYC, 80,000 children are considered homeless in total

• When a family wants to seek help for being homeless, they only have one place to go: a place called PATH. They only have on location in the Bronx that services all five boroughs

• 110 families go to PATH everyday to get placed for shelter

• A majority of the homeless are between ages 0-12 (young children are the ones who are mostly homeless in NYC)––a stark contrast to the stereotypical image of homelessness.

• Many homeless families are housed in commercial hotels when there is no more available space in local shelters. But because of stereotypes, there are often protests against families staying in those shelters. As a result, those families have to be moved to shelters much further away from their original homes and the children's’ schools, which affects their education and overall lifestyle.

​​In conclusion, Mercedes and Tiffany were very nice, welcoming, and incredibly enthusiastic about our being there. They have also agreed to be our supervisors for the project, and look forward to see what we will produce. I’m excited to see what comes next!