Making Connections Again

Kevin Adler, setting up a homeless newspaper vendor with a GoPro for an autobiographical shoot.

Have you ever lost contact with a family member? How often have you tried to re-connect? Has a family member experienced hard times and you don't know what became of him/her?

At the other end of this question could be a lost person, someone who hit bottom so hard that he/she lost a home and ended up living in the street. Maybe it's too embarrassing to admit that the times have become this hard, the fall has been so steep. Does anyone bother to think that this homeless person is a real person, someone with family members out there?

What would happen if family could be reconnected again, those ties re-established? That is something Kevin Adler, who founded the company NEARSHOT, had pondered as the December holidays neared. So, he set about meeting the homeless people on the streets of San Francisco with some hot tea, warm bread, and a video camera. The camera was included to record messages to loved ones by those he met out on the street.



Why go out of his way to provide some way to reconnect, some way to reach out, for those experiencing this amount of hardship? Kevin says, "Each person and situation is different, so it's impossible to generalize. There is almost always one person who they would like to get back in touch with or say hi to."

What proved to be a great method to reconnect was posting those video messages to social media sites, such as HOMELESSPOV on facebook. And that's where things got interesting. A chain of connection would occur, as people in old hometowns recognized the person making the recording.

For one man, Jeffrey Gottschall, who was known as a homeless man in San Francisco, he was recognized as Jeffrey the classmate, brother, uncle, friend that he really was. His former community came through and raised more than $3000 through crowdfunding to get the help he needed to relocate back where the familiar people in his life are also located. And most of all, with that connection came the recognition that he was a human being with his own background and personality. That was, indeed, worth any video recording.

Jeffrey Gottschall, missing from family and friends for 12 years.

Thanks to this article from Huffington Post for the information: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/29/san-francisco-homeless-videos_n_6575074.html?utm_hp_ref=good-news, and the above links.

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