Building a Museum of Homelessness

In our society, a museum is a symbol.

When we overcome a great injustice, when we right a wrong, we build a museum. It's our way of saying that - through our collective effort - we fixed a problem in out society. We send our students to museums on school trips so they can learn the way things used to be. So they can see the world as it was and make sure that that our future will be better than our past. It's a cathedral of progress.

On Valentine's Day, I had the honour of speaking at Martin Luther University College's Leadership Breakfast about what it would be like to visit this museum in Canada.

It starts with a drive through the city to get there. As you hit the red light where the motels are, there's no one panning for change at the intersection to secure their necessities for life. In the little plot of land where there used to be an encampment, there are no tarps, no tents. The meal program that used to feed so many people is empty now. It's kitchen space has been repurposed to train culinary students. And finally, on the edge of town, the space that used to hols a tiny home community for people with nowhere else to go is empty now. It closed - not because of lack of support, but because they couldn't fill the tiny homes anymore. Nobody needs them.

When you enter the Museum, you find a series of exhibits on the road down into homelessness. They have titles like:

• The Hall of Rising Rents, an IKEA-style showroom of the increasingly-tiny apartments people living on disability could afford from 1994 to 2015;

• The Origins of Opioids, where we learn about how pharmaceutical companies lied about these drugs not being addictive, flooded the market with them, and cut them off, allowing street drugs took over;

• Toxic Drugs, where a magnifying glass shows how much fentanyl it would take to kill a person;

• The Experiences of Women on the Street, describing the unbelievable threats to safety and compromises and trade-offs they must make to stay well;

• Tents and Tarps, surrounding you with the found items, resources, and ingenuity of people surviving through storms in makeshift shelters in encampments;

• Street Pets, showing the companion animals who never left their owners' side when everything else fell apart, and the owners who provided food and warmth and care for their dog even when they couldn't provide for themselves.

As you continue through exhibit after exhibit, you notice the floor below you is sloping down. This building, so small from the outside you barely noticed it, is entrenched deeply into the ground. Every move pulls you deeper and deeper into the problem, farther from the light of day.

But at the end of this path is a room. The room is round, like the bottom of a stone well, and the walls stretch up and up and up. High up at the top of the room, a skylight fills the space with a warm light. Even this far down, the light still reaches.

And on the walls, there are names. This room holds the names of everyone who died from addictions, homelessness, and poverty. Everyone who died from cold in a community with so much warmth. Everyone who died alone in a community with so much connection.

In this memorial, you can run your fingers on their names, carved in stone, their lives full of complicated beauty, perhaps never having received a proper burial.

On the other side of this round room there is a door, and through that door there is a path. But unlike the path you were on before, this path leads upwards. It is a rising road out of homelessness in our community.

As it rises, the walls begin to fill with plaques. Plaques that name the people who ended this problem. The ones who built the museum. The brave individuals and organizations who refused to accept a reality where homelessness, addiction, and suffering are the norm. The people who helped lead us out of this problem.

I believe that this can be a real place to take our children to, in our lifetime, and I believe every city can have one. Who would be featured in the path out of homelessness in your community?

Tony