Hey Local Guides!
If you’re anything like me, you love being a Local Guide because you love people. You believe in people. You celebrate people. You see the best in people. I’m excited to share that the “most interesting thing I’ve done as a Local Guide” is to help my neighbors - people who are experiencing homelessness.
There are an estimated 580,000 homeless individuals in the United States and about 1,000 of them live in my neighborhood of Santa Monica, California. It’s a heartbreaking epidemic. After a few “smiles and hellos” between us, I asked a gentleman named Joe what I could do to help people like him living on the streets. He said there were a lot of resources out there, but it was tough to find them because he has “Finding Dory Syndrome” and always gets lost. He said he needed a “better map.”
The Local Guides mission is to share a better map for all, including Joe. So I started creating Google Maps lists just for Joe, so he’d know what his options are regarding basic necessities like food and shelter. We exchanged email addresses and I sent him a map within an hour.
Joe was stunned and said, “you have really…, i mean wow. you raised the bar on the system in place. like you pulled this list together and created a new kind of policy, for how homeless info should be easy for them to see.” Since then, I’ve created six lists that are aimed toward helping vulnerable communities and people like Joe. We even presented our idea to leverage Google Maps at a recent city meeting addressing homelessness. I’ve even been on conference calls now with nonprofits in both, Florida and California to teach caseworkers and program managers how to create Google Maps lists to share resources and locations with their clients.
Joe and I now talk daily, dreaming and scheming of ways to distribute our Google Maps lists to people in need. Caseworkers who have known him for many years say that they’ve seen more hope in him lately, because he is passionate on working on the Google Maps initiatives with me. It’s given me a more meaningful sense of purpose and connection to the Local Guides program and profoundly changed my life.
Here are all of the Google Maps Lists in one spot:
Like I said, we’re all in this Local Guides program because we love people. We believe in people. And we celebrate people. Joe said this in an email to me and a few case workers not too long ago, “this was a case where residents saved the day. that’s the message. residents see and care.” It means everything to me for someone as special as Joe to know he’s seen and cared for.
Helping my neighbors find critical resources is absolutely the most interesting thing I’ve done as a Local Guide and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
