Help Prevent Strokes Among Homeless Day Laborers

I’ve shared before that I used to work at a homeless medical clinic, but at the time I didn’t give too many details (anything to do with health care is a pretty sensitive topic). Well, I wanted to tell you a little more about it today.

Before I moved to Jacksonville, I worked in Gainesville, Florida at the Helping Hands Clinic. Helping Hands is an amazing organization that is a volunteer medical clinic serving the homeless and poverty-stricken population of Alachua County. I could go on and on about Helping Hands, but suffice it to say that the significance of this organization plus my heart for the homeless made Helping Hands one of the biggest things I knew I would miss when we moved to Jacksonville.

Before I continue, I wanted to try and clear up some misconceptions about the homeless population. In our culture there is a huge stigma attached to homelessness, and a lot of people seem to think that the homeless are unintelligent, alcoholics or drug addicts, scary or dangerous, or that they must not care because if they cared about their life they would get out of their situation. This is not true. The only thing that separates someone who is homeless from you and I is that you and I can afford the roof over our heads. It does not mean you are smarter than the homeless. It does not mean you’re better than them. It means nothing.

Do you know how hard it is to "turn your life around" when you’re homeless? I know there are some of you out there who are currently looking for jobs. Imagine on top of that, also not knowing how you’d even be able to get to the interview, let alone where you’d get a pair of black pants and a clean t-shirt to wear to the interview. Imagine interviewing with potential employers who don’t want to hire you because they think there must be something wrong with you because you’re homeless. Imagine having a college degree, but the only work you can find is manual day labor.

I know this isn’t the case with all homeless, but for many, they used to be like you and I. I knew one woman who used to be a small business owner with her husband, and who was a well-respected woman in her community. She lost everything when she and her husband got divorced, and had nothing and no one to help her when she became epileptic.

Also imagine how, if you can’t even afford a roof over your head, how are you going to be able to afford health care? Especially in a health care system like the United States where it’s so difficult to navigate and get the help you need, especially in the financing and insurance departments.

Take this into consideration, and then stop to think about the kind of lifestyle many homeless have, and the kinds of food they eat. Think about the kinds of food a lot of people will give to homeless. Cheap foods like packaged foods, canned foods, super salty foods. Foods that are not ideal for hypertension prevention. So while you can try to help and share tidbits about a healthy lifestyle and foods to eat, if your only option is to eat what someone gives you or not eat at all, you’ll eat it.

This is why I’m asking for your help.

Helping Hands is the running for $50,000 of funding from the Pepsi Refresh Project. (The Pepsi Refresh Project is the money that Pepsi normally would have invested in Super Bowl ads that they instead decided to use on various sustainable community projects, decided by an innovative social media campaign.)

Here’s a brief overview of the project Helping Hands is seeking funding for:

Helping Hands Clinic’s patients are poor day laborers who become disabled from treatable conditions like hypertension.  Barriers to their hypertension control include  cost of medicines and follow up, side effects, and wait times at free clinics.  Laborers are tired after a long day of work and lack the patience to wait.  Besides, hypertension doesn’t "hurt." We have developed a plan for a "fast track" hypertension clinic which will set aside visit slots for return patients who merely need refills of their hypertension medication.  Using protocols for specially trained volunteers who will come to know their patients, meds, and lab work, we will limit wait times & enhance the relationship building that brings patients back.  This grant will pay for the costs of clinic formulary ($4) medications, labwork, & salary support of a volunteer coordinator.

So, I’m posting all of this to see if you would be willing to help vote for Helping Hands to receive funding from the Pepsi Refresh Project.

Go directly to the link below:

http://www.refresheverything.com/helpinghandsclinichypertensioncontrol

Resist the urge to immediately click on the large “Vote for this Idea” button. You have to sign in first.

At the bottom left of the page, quite small, are two choices:

SIGN IN / JOIN PEPSI REFRESH

If you have not yet joined, i.e., voted a previous day, select Join Pepsi Refresh. It will take you through a brief sign up process. Once you have signed up and gone through the password and verification process, it should take you right back to the Helping Hands page. THEN you can click Vote For This Idea, and you’ve done it. (At the bottom of the page it shows how many votes you have left for the day; it should change from 10 to 9 if it registered your vote.)

If you DID already join, at the bottom of the Helping Hands page at link above, just click “SIGN IN.” The sign in page will pop up, and once you have signed in for the day, it will pop right back to our page. THEN you can click Vote For This Idea. At the bottom of the page it shows how many votes you have left for the day; it should change from 10 to 9 when it registers your vote

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and thank you for voting. You can vote every day in September, so as many times as you can vote would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!