The Change.org "End Homelessness" Solution!

UPDATE:
Well, Change.org apparently has ended ALL the various "blogs" now, ONLY offering online "petitions". Just so, ALL of my previous postings no longer show on that site. Awhile back, they emailed blog authors advising that a new contract was being emailed out, to supercede and replace all the existing ones.

I never received one of the new ones, and so was removed from their authors/bloggers list. Wonder why? '-)

About a year ago, there was an interesting "story" that developed involved Change.org and a homeless author. Perhaps it's time to take a closer look, now that it's played out even more. Where will it be published and available? Stay tuned....

[Original Entry here:]

End the "End Homelessness" blog! Voila!

That's just what they did, apparently, and folded all the "homeless" categorized items under the umbrella Issue: "Poverty in America". Hmmm ... why just "America"? While at it, that could all get collapsed under an "Economic Justice" category, - globally, eh?

As usual, these kinds of matters basically come down to various priorities and practicalities. Things like "positioning", "demographics" and the like. And now that the site/venture has honed its cachet to be "action" specific (i.e. mainly linked, online things to simply click a mouse-button, rather than more real world involvement like show-up-somewhere or go-do-something-directly-in-person) the slant compels, and filters, "blog" entry picks on a basis that there be a reasonably relevant such "action" available, to merit inclusion and publishing. Many significant, even important, truer blog entries aren't that, of course. Oh, well...

It was actually some time after I'd "joined" there and had even begun to have material published that I discovered that Change.org isn't even a nonprofit venture. Understandably, it was the ".org" in the name and URL that fooled ... uh, that is, threw me, of course. For a long time the internet custom and etiquette was to reserve/use "org" for nonprofits. For-profit businesses typically use the familiar "dot com" [.com].

As it turns out, there is no actual rule or law or anything that outright prevents for-profit businesses from using "org" ... so maybe this is news to you. Sure was to me, and I've been very involved online for literally decades. Well, more accurately, I realized that there was no real "authority" that can or was checking on that kind of thing and "enforcing" - rather, there's been a voluntary ethic about such usage. For a business to deliberately breach such a longstanding practice could even seem ... what ... even a bit knowingly deceptive?

But such might be some of the emerging vagaries of the newer type of business that Change.org is, known as "socialpreneuring" ... meant to appeal to people's responses to various "social media" while harnessing various, say, "assets" of their personal activity, efforts and certainly their personal contacts and family/friends. Possibly meant to "do good" as well. And to mine and purpose these for business and, naturally, profits - if not a nonprofit org ... er, outfit. Whatever.

Perhaps the Change.org business came to find that Ending Homelessness wasn't turning out to be a profitable thing? After all, how could it be? That's probably an examination best left for another time, and possibly another place.

Still, is actually Ending Homelessness even a realistic mission? Or is demoting, de-emphasizing, subordinating and/or dropping any such campaign while manifestly cutting way back on resources, people, efforts so deployed more the order of the day? After all, just take a look around. The latter appears to be something of a trend, most places. Business ... as usual?