Homeless Awareness Holiday Event

Good evening, everybody.  Happy Holidays to you!  I'm really delighted to be here with all of you on this beautiful Saturday evening at Lake Eola and especially to be a very small part of this First Homeless Awareness Holiday event.  Today, as you already know, has been proclaimed by Orlando's Mayor, the Honorable Glenda Hood, as Homeless Awareness Day.  And, like you, I am hoping that this is the first of many other events of this nature designed to heighten our awareness of homelessness and poverty as residents of Orlando and Central Florida and as citizens of the United States of America.

What I would like to say now will not take very long, but I would like you to really hear it and take it to heart!  So here it goes!  Homelessness and poverty in the United States as well as in Orlando and Central Florida are two of the most disguised aspects of the human condition.  This is why we cannot always accept the information provided by the U.S. Bureau of Census about the percentage of Americans affected by this condition.  In fact, the actual situation we are facing now and have faced for sometime is much worse than represented by local, state and federal governments.  The fact is that a disproportionate number of American families and individual citizens are, in one way or another, "touched" by homelessness and poverty at some point in the "dance of life."  The people we see on the streets of this city and on the streets of those sprawling urban centers across America are there not because they are lazy or irresponsible or unmotivated or illiterate or "on drugs" which, as you already know, constitute the stereotypical reasons many of us have advanced in order to rationalize our own apathy.  They are there because sometimes life throws all of us "curve balls" which we cannot hit.  And so we "strike out" and find ourselves on the street with virtually no place to lay our head.  This can happen to anyone!  None of us is exempt!

There are, of course, many reasons for this, and the road back to self-respect and human dignity is hard, very hard, and dangerous, very dangerous.  It includes living without the benefit of shelter or food or those we love or those we once loved.  I believe you know exactly what I am saying and that you are here because you care about what happens to the homeless and poor citizens of our community, even if you do not know their names.

This is why Valencia Community College, one of Florida's 28 community colleges, has been working, since June of last year, with a small core of colleagues and friends of the college to support and fund, under its umbrella, a college level credit course of study in the Humanities so that poor and homeless citizens of Orlando "The City Beautiful" can rediscover the power which resides inside of them and with the help of an academic community which truly cares can call this power up and out and give it form so that homelessness and poverty will not kill the human spirit any more than it already has.

We at Valencia Community College, believe that knowledge is power and that the homeless and poor citizens of our community have unlimited potential to extricate themselves from what Earl Shorris in his Riches for the Poor of 1997 called "the surround of force".  We believe that homelessness and poverty must be unmasked and that the power of knowledge, when combined with the unlimited potential which resides in every person, must be made available to every poor and homeless citizen of our community now.  This is the hope of Valencia Community College for Orlando's poor and homeless citizens, and it is a hope we invite you to support and to keep alive until it becomes a reality sometime this year.  Thank you very much everybody and Happy Holidays!