Theory of Change
Theory of Change

Identifying Long-Term Goals

The very first step when embarking on an aspiration to enact serious change is to establish what it is you exactly hope to see. Without these goals pre-established, there is no target to aim for, and meaningful, well-intentioned action could be rendered ineffective. As I put in more detail in the following section “a story to call your own,” my initial desire to commit myself to the global challenge of homelessness stems from my pragmatic view of solving a very old and complicated problem that hasn’t been payed the kind of attention I think it deserves. To be clear, when I say “my pragmatic view” of a solution, I mean to refer to a redistribution of wealth shared by the top income earners in the U.S. to the benefit of improving urban planning in cities across America. It is beyond the scope of this project to say exactly to what extent urban planning should be changed in order to get more people into homes, but instead, I focus on more relatable actions that can be magnified to make an overall difference. With that, the overarching objective of this entire campaign is to get the recognition of housing as a human right for all individuals in cities across the U.S.. To give you some frame of reference, only three states provide some kind of head start to my proposal. In Massachusetts, families but not individuals have a right to shelter; in California, runaway children have a right to be admitted into emergency shelter without parental consent; and New York City also recognizes a right for individuals to emergency shelter. Beyond this, any additional research committed as a result of this shift in policy would also count as reaching peripheral goals. Considering a lack of robust literature in the social sciences dissecting homelessness, there is little objectivity in this program proposal. Instead, my simplistic and humanistic approach to tackling this issue rests on the potential of people to see with kindness without judgment, and though it may be a virtually unobtainable goal, I also aspire for #KindnessConspiracy to one day end unnecessary homelessness.

Inducing From these Goals, Necessary Preconditions

In order to create a pathway for change, I must work backwards, using induction, to establish all necessary and sufficient conditions required to bring about my desired outcomes. Coming from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, housing is already on that list, but in order to get this considered a protected right under U.S. law, a lot of political action must be taken. Taking examples from American contemporary history, protests and political demonstrations by citizens typically end with concessions being made even if violence was endured along the way. Of course, I am speaking of Women’s Suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement. With a similar goal to expand human rights, I expect the process I am speaking of to bare a lot of similarities to these mass efforts made by our grandparents. I argue that the fight is still not over because families and individuals still suffer and die due an insufficient protection of basic human rights.

With the idea that mass protests are necessary to achieve these goals, one more precondition is made obvious. In order for demonstrations to be effective, they must not fall onto deaf ears of a government unwilling to make concessions. Currently America is experiencing a back-sliding democracy, where more and more people grow distrustful of state institutions. If enough faith in the system’s ability to work is lost, irreversible damage may be done, which could render all political campaigns useless, so a belief that legislative action has a purpose in completing these goals is also a necessary precondition.

Holding Assumptions to be True

Before you follow the logic of my solution, there are three assumptions that need to be held. The first is a dual assumption about the behavior of the intended audience as well as the expected behavior of a viral idea on social media. To explain, the #KindnessConspiracy is a campaign at the same time that it is a hashtag, which can be used to sort posts similar to one another. The idea is to focus our campaign from the start on college age groups and younger. This way, there is a higher likelihood of the hashtag catching on as it was intended by spreading across media platforms and gaining wide-spread attention.

The second assumption that needs to be held is the legitimate possibility of public policy reflecting a shift in public opinion. In theory, elected officials remain in office so long as they represent the interests of their constituents. Holding this to be true, if enough people living in L.A. demanded from their city officials a change to the situation of homelessness, there would, at least, be an effort made.

Lastly, an assumption about the effectiveness of labeling something a human right should be stated. By this I mean, homelessness would be less of a problem if it was legally considered an infringement on human rights. In other words, the de jure entitlement of housing as a human right should lead to de facto less homelessness.

Proposed Interventions

Here I will provide a schema for undertaking a project like the #KindnessConspiracy. At first, I am going to explain the immediate steps to get just the idea of a social campaign off the ground. This will be a very small initiative compared to the larger movement I am trying to engineer. Once I lay out what I expect to result after taking these “baby” steps, I will move into a more general discussion about how this can apply to larger sophomore steps and possibly senior steps that involve the endorsement of celebrities and large concert events in the promotion of human rights to housing across the world.

As a student at Pepperdine with prior experience helping to organize and participate in volunteer events around the L.A. area, I have chosen the surrounding L.A. community as the testing grounds for the initial steps to the Kindness Conspiracy. Once I have assembled a dedicated team of no less than ten members, we will begin from the very bottom by servicing the homeless community in Malibu. This will serve as an introduction into a never-ending process of learning, where by which I and the rest of the team expand our understanding of the uniqueness of homelessness by learning the stories of the people afflicted. Once we learn about an individuals story, we do what we can with the resources we have to help them for the day. To help them in a longer term way, we will share their story on social media with the hashtag Kindness Conspiracy. This will hopefully begin to increase the awareness of growing numbers of homeless in cities and promote people to do something about it by offering the internet a template for interacting with a rough sleeper who can be hard to approach.

Moving into a higher phase of implementation, we will have a larger team that is more diverse in their capabilities. This expansion of our team will be needed, as there will be many more demands coming from an older and more sophisticated campaign. With enough legitimacy and recognition, my hope is for this campaign to get invites from colleges to speak about pressing issues concerning the infringement of human dignity like chronic homelessness. We can run a trial at Pepperdine and then use what worked at the next university we end up going to.

Since I go to Pepperdine, there are other opportunities to make the Kindness Conspiracy event on campus more effective. For one, I could go through the necessary process to start my own club convocation, which focuses on the Biblical importance of taking care of the poor and emphasizes what that means in a modern context. One specific example of what I could do with my club convo is sleep on Alumni Park with just the average supplies a homeless person might have. If this club convocation continued for a long enough time, it could be a dedicated day recognized by all students who wanted to get the experience of sleeping rough for a night.

Where there are small and medium-sized steps, there must be an attempt to make large steps. Being as my ultimate goal is to eliminate homelessness, there is no need to hold back my ambitions. I will now briefly explore what a nation-wide movement with a real possibility of achieving said goal might look like. At this stage, the more exposure to large crowds we can get the greater our chances will be of gaining traction in political attention. It is here that I will stress the importance of gaining endorsements for #KindnessConspiracy. This could be endorsements by brands or celebrities; what matters the most in this phase is air time, whether it be commercials on T.V. payed for by our partners or concert events played in support of our campaign. Of course throughout this phase, our even larger team will be visiting and giving presentations about our campaign to any university that will have us. It is my hope, if not to have the ear of the rich or famous, to have the ear of the young and educated. The effectiveness of this program rests on my generation’s willingness to accept this challenge when no one else would.

Indicators of Progress

When taken off the drawing board and finally put to test in the field, there will need to be signs that indicate whether or not the program was effective or not. There is also a need to separate the obvious indicator, which would be less homelessness in major U.S. cities, apart from more nuanced signals that can tell us more precisely what is working or what about the program needs to be improved. One sure sign to know if the local community responds to #KindnessConspiracy’s baby steps is if the city of Malibu makes an attempt to partner with us or just simply acknowledges our efforts. This could manifest itself in the form of a locally celebrated homelessness awareness day.

An indicator of an intermediate amount of progress would be an increase in the number of published articles concerning the effects of homelessness. As mentioned, the lack of research in this field presents a serious challenge to future leaders who will work towards the same ends as me.

Finally, an indicator of substantial progress would be somewhere like Los Angeles ratifying to their city charter a provision protecting housing as a human right. This kind of action would be the most concrete example of progress, as it would represent a legislative body being open to substantial change.

Overall Narrative

Putting this into a succinct narrative will give this project the potential it needs to catch like a wild fire. The premise of the #KindnessConspiracy rests on its ability to self-promote like previous social media trends. Except this has no room to be a short-lived trend if it is going to have long-term ramifications on reducing homelessness. Right now, I see the misinformation of what causes someone to be homeless as the number one hinderance to finding a solution. My plan of action to fix this hindrance is to lead a social campaign dedicated to educating young adults about the unseen lives of of people living on streets. Once the truth is uncovered about the unnecessary suffering caused by unprotected human rights, a realization by our society can be made that confirms these rights and ensures an end to this suffering.

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