Berkeley Cares
Aliena Wells, Executive Director
2425-B Channing Way, No. 320
Berkeley, Calif. 94704

This simple and effective program emerged at first from the desire of a caring community to help its homeless people without sending them down the wrong track; it has been so effective that cities all over the U.S. are looking to it for possible replication.

It began simply enough in 1990, Aliena Wells said, when "aggressive panhandling" by the community's many homeless people (who apparently flock to Berkeley because of the city's liberal and counter-cultural reputation) started to become a concern even by its relatively casual standards.

Residents wanted to help, but they weren't particularly interested in seeing their handouts used for drugs and alcohol.

Enter Berkeley Cares, the creation of a task force of 50 citizens organized to come up with creative ways to solve the problem. Enumerating the community's homeless, the group discovered, somewhat to its surprise, that 800 to 1,600 hard-core homeless individuals -- up to 2 percent of the city's population -- called Berkeley's streets home. But most of them were "invisible" homeless, with only about a few dozen of them actively panhandling; and the majority of the panhandlers were "professionals," poor but not actually homeless.

To give residents the option of helping these people without enabling their addictions, the group came up with a creative idea: Sell VOUCHERS at public places, available in 25-cent units, normally sold in sheets of 12 for $3. Rather than giving panhandlers cash, residents could buy vouchers at drug stores, libraries, government offices and other public places and hand them out instead of coins. Participating stores in the region would accept the vouchers at face value in lieu of cash, but would not redeem them for alcohol or other "inappropriate" purchases.

The concept started a little slowly but quickly gained popularity, with $5,000 in vouchers changing hands in the program's first year, $30,000 in the second and $56,000 in the third; by the time Berkeley Cares celebrated its fourth anniversary in July 1995, it had distributed 400,000 vouchers totaling $100,000. The program is relatively simple to administer, involving regular visits to merchants and institutions to encourage participation, and frequent trips to distribute new vouchers, collect the old, and keep the books balanced. With the help of volunteers, Berkeley Cares gets its job done with a staff of two and an annual budget of just $115,000. They spend a lot of time on the telephone answering questions from organizations around the country interested in replicating the idea, and have prepared a comprehensive replication kit that they sell for its actual cost, $25. To Wells's knowledge, the program has been replicated in at least 13 places, including Santa Cruz, New Haven, New York City (Westside Cares) and Seattle (where it is run through the police department) as well as three in Canada.

"It takes some work to get it started," Wells said. "You need to get the collaboration between local businesses and government and service providers. But with that backing, it's not difficult to get something like this going."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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