Project Homeless Connect, By C. Wright Mills

Service-learning is a great way of helping others in need and learn about our community, people around us and ourselves. Project Homeless Connect is supposed to be a project to help those who do not have enough resources and a home. It raises the question of how do people get to that situation: Is it one’s personal trouble or a public issue? The answer for that is quite complex. The sociological imagination, according to C. Wright Mills (1959) “enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social
According to C. Wright Mills (1959), personal troubles “occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his or her immediate relations with others; they have to do with one's self and with those limited areas of social life of which one is directly and personally aware” (C. Wright Mills, 1959). Someone can turn out to be homeless because of their lack of motivation to work, addictions, and other personal characteristics. In my experience at Project Homeless Connect, I cannot tell if Mia, the woman I was assigned to help, was homeless because of her own issues since we only spent a couple of hours together. She was very quiet and shy and actually spent most part of the time on her phone. I went to get her some food while she waited in line to get her vision checked. I gave her two slices of pizza and water. She noticed that I did not get food for myself and then she offered me one of her slices of pizza. I was moved by her action. She is homeless and the little that she had to eat that time, she was willing to share with me, despite the fact that she does not even know me. Her action showed me that she is kind and have a good heart. In contrast, while I was in line to get food, some volunteers were cutting line. Their response for doing that was that it did not matter since the place was already lacking organization. In my point of view, this can be
Wright Mills (1959), “have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of her inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieu into the institutions of an historical society as a whole” (C. Wright Mills, 1959). Project Homeless Connect showed me that homelessness has more to do with the institutions. It lacked organization and information for the volunteers and the participants, causing chaos in some areas. I could presence an African American woman stereotyping other two African American women as homeless, when they were there as volunteers. The demand for help and the lines to get assisted with determined service was huge, some workers were very rude to the participants, making them frustrated and in many cases, giving up to get help. These examples of issues at Project Homeless Connect and others amplified to the society, may be the real cause of homelessness. If someone already has difficulties in life due to personal troubles, and the institutions as a whole does not have structure to give assistance, homelessness can become reality in his/her