Everett homeless awareness plan a complete mistake

While well-intentioned, a homeless advocacy stunt happening right now in Everett is not just unnecessary, but it’s potentially dangerous.

A Snohomish County homeless resource group called Cocoon House is trying to raise awareness in downtown Everett on a number of issues facing homeless teens.

Their campaign is called “Take a Close Look.”

They’ve set up a number of clothed mannequins across the city and they’ve attached a small storyline to each of them.

Outside of the Silver Cup Coffee in downtown Everett there’s a mannequin teen wearing a hoodie and jeans and the message attached reads, “My mom’s boyfriend hurts me.”

Other mannequins have been set up across the city, according to the Daily Herald. You’ve got one outside of the public library and one by the Xfinity Arena.

Some of the slogans read, “I’m 12 and hungry.” Another reads, “My dad kicked me out because I’m gay.”

The thought is if you take a closer look, you start to better understand the unique issues facing homeless teens and you’ll be called to action.

Related: Seattle can’t cure its homeless issue with tent cities

But there are some significant problems with this campaign, starting with how this can actually be very dangerous. The idea is to get you to really look at the homeless. In this case, you have to stare at the mannequins and read their little stories.

Should we be staring at the homeless, treating them like animals in a zoo? Hey mom, look at the homeless kid! You point, you maybe throw some popcorn at them? That obviously won’t end well.

The truth is, we all already see the homeless people &#8212 teens or adults. We sometimes pretend not to because it makes us feel bad or we have our own problems and we don’t want to deal with theirs. We see them. We’re hyper-aware of the homeless population in Washington, whether it be in Everett, Tacoma or Seattle.

Staring at them hasn’t made a dent in the problem. We come up with our own narratives half the time. We see a homeless kid in Sodo and we think he’s choosing to be homeless. I’ve heard that a lot.

We see the homeless teen or people in their early 20s and we assume that they are drunk or a drug addict and beyond our help.

Sometimes we see older homeless people and we say to ourselves, well, he’s lazy, just get a job.

We fool ourselves into thinking that getting out of the place where they find themselves homeless is something easy to do.

We take no action. We see them and take no action, so what makes this group think this campaign will be any different? Looking at a mannequin isn’t nearly as powerful as looking at an actual human who is suffering and homeless.

We need an action plan and that’s the bigger problem with this campaign.

It doesn’t appear to actually give you any call to action beyond donating to the Cocoon House, an organization that seems like an amazing one that you should donate to, but that doesn’t actually end homelessness. It provides resources for homeless teens, which is important, but how about we have a serious conversation about getting at the root cause of some of these issues?

We say we care about it, but at what point do we actually do something about it?

We sure as hell like to talk about it. Some cities like to throw money at it, lots of money. Other cities like to throw laws at it to try to criminalize the behavior, which just pushes the homeless into a neighboring city. Others like to pretend creating tent cities actually fixes the problem.

The only way to fix homelessness is to understand that no one city can even make a dent. Seattle can’t do it alone. Everett can’t do it alone. Redmond, Puyallup, Tacoma, and Bellevue &#8212 these cities can’t do it alone.

So if you want to do something, yes, go for it. Donate to Cocoon House, but also start lobbying your leaders to actually work with their neighbors to come up with plans to tackle the issue.