There are many ways to explode the box.  So far (in my what, 3 blog posts?) we’ve only covered technological innovation, but I want to reconsider.  If I’m truly interested in sharing things that change society, this can’t just be about stuff.  There is so much more to making everything better than more inventions… Ideas, movements, acts of service… Exploding the box is about different ways of seeing the world, paying attention to what allows people to change the world for the people around them.  And today, we’ll start by talking about Sam Tsemberis.

Sam Tsemberis has fundamentally changed the way many cities in America are thinking about homelessness because he’s come up with an idea so simple, so elegant, that it never occurred to the bureaucracy of America:  Give the homeless homes.

Shockingly, this bizarre decision has actually saved the state of Utah hundreds of thousands of dollars since they implemented it; it turns out that paying for peoples’ housing is a lot less expensive for the state than leaving them on the street.  Even better than that, it has allowed the people who have been housed to start putting their lives back together.  It turns out it’s a lot harder to get someone to quit drugs or get treatment for a mental illness when their primary concern is where they’ll sleep tonight and whether or not they’ll be safe.  Sam Tsemberis exploded the box by proposing this new way of dealing with chronic homelessness, and it seems to be working to great effect:  In Arlington, the amount of people who are homeless has dropped from 531 in 2010 to 291 last year.  There has also been a 95% success rate of people staying in their homes once housed.  What an innovative idea!

For more reading on what’s going on, read :https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/06/meet-the-outsider-who-accidentally-solved-chronic-homelessness/ and https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/arlingtons-no-silos-approach-has-housed-hundreds-of-chronically-homeless-adults/2015/01/31/ba5dddaa-8571-11e4-b9b7-b8632ae73d25_story.html