By Becky Monk
When Paul Shoemaker wrote his book “Can’t Not Do” about finding your purpose and tackling big hairy problems in the world, Krishnan Iyer was at the book launch and he was inspired by his fellow Microsoft alumnus.
“I was telling Paul, ‘I don't have my Can't Not Do.’ So, he actually wrote it on my book, ‘I hope you find your ‘Can't Not Do.’” He said. “So, I took that book, and I had it, and I didn't find it right away. So, I was always like, ‘What is my Can't Not Do?’"
Turns out that passion project for Krishnan is Humanize Homelessness, his new nonprofit organization that aims to make it easy to help people experiencing homelessness.
Krishnan rallied other Microsoft alumni, including Jayant Swamy, Shesh Mathur and John Coates, and members of his community network to tackle a few small pieces of a very big problem in the greater Seattle area. Around half a million Americans are estimated to be experiencing homelessness. King County, with approximately 11,643 homeless individuals, has the third largest homeless population trailing only Los Angeles County and New York City.
He’s making sure that as they build the nonprofit they’re using some of the big lessons they learned during their time at Microsoft – build on your super powers, know your customers, work with partners, make it scalable.
For Krishnan, finding his “Can’t not do” coincided with an Indian Hindu temple being defaced with hate graffiti and language. The anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. was gaining a louder voice.
“I also felt like people like me, who are immigrants, who came here, we have been very blessed to live in this place, to have a beautiful place to live in, to have good schools, to have water, to have parks, a beautiful place,” he said. “And so, I felt like we have a responsibility to give back, right, because we've taken a lot. When you see that the person who wrote that on the temple wall, he obviously didn't see us helping. He didn't see us as being part of the mainstream community, helping local problems. So, I felt like we have to do something about that.”
He started visiting homeless shelters in the community and asking what he could do to help. Skeptical shelter leaders who get offers from well-intentioned people all the time told him to come back around Thanksgiving and provide food. Then he rallied friends in his Microsoft alumni network and the Indian community at large to help.
“Maybe about two-thirds said yes, and then half actually came. And then a quarter actually stayed,” Krishnan recalls. Fellow Microsoft alum Jayant Swamy was among them. He signed on to help launch Bellevue, Washington-based Humanize Homelessness and is now a Humanize Ambassador. Krishnan said when they went back to the shelter, they were taken more seriously and started to learn more about what was needed and how to effectively communicate. “And then we started to earn their trust.”
They hosted happy hours with shelter leaders to learn about the gaps and needs. Those learning sessions set up the basics for the programs Humanize Homelessness would eventually deliver and become the basis for the name and the language they use to describe the company’s mission, Krishnan said.
“One of the things that I have learned is that we should never label people, because when you call somebody as, ‘Hey, you're homeless,’ it sticks, and they feel like, ‘Oh, I'm homeless, and I can never be housed,’” Krishnan said. “So, early on I was taught by many folks that the right term for it is, people experiencing homelessness, because we want it to be a temporary situation, so they can get out of it.”
The “humanize” part of the nonprofit’s name refers to the community at large.
“We want the humanity that's in all of us, the compassion that we already have inside, which due to many experiences have been blocked, we want it to be opened up,” Krishnan said. “That means that when you see a person then you can understand them, right, and not judge them.”
That’s where the first of three programs that Humanize Homelessness comes in. It’s called Know Your Neighbor.
“It's not just about going to the soup kitchen and serving food, because that sets up a power dynamic in the sense that, ‘Hey, I'm the provider, you're the receiver.’ It's always a very different dynamic, so we said we want to change that dynamic,” Krishnan said. “One of the new things we're introducing is that you sit down and share your food with them. It's just like you have a block party or something like that, with your neighbors or your friends. You have an event, when you get together and you eat food together, because that's a different dynamic.”
Krishnan and the Humanize Homelessness team used Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, as “the on-ramp” for the Indian community to reach beyond its own circle and get involved. The results were beyond what he anticipated. Seniors made care packages that included lights, socks, lip balm and other things that the men and women might need. Then they came together taking the Diwali celebration with food and lights into three different shelters and celebrated with 150 people experiencing homelessness.
“We did a very similar thing with the Jewish Cultural and Community Center, where you celebrated something called Purim, where we had a rabbi come in and explain what Purim is. Then they served the food and stuff like that,” Krishnan said.
Out of this came a replicable model that is scalable, Krishnan said.
“We give them all the necessary tools, that they can go recruit five of their friends. And then we find a shelter for them to go do Know Your Neighbor. “Depending on how much food you want to cook, if you want to bring five or 20 people, we can get you 20 people to Know Your Neighbor celebration with, or 150.”
The next program has Krishnan and his colleagues identifying ways to assist those experiencing homelessness get off the streets and out of the shelters.
“That's a very complex problem, and we're just starting to scratch the surface,” he said. “So, we have a program called Back on Your Feet, to build services or fill the gaps that exist between employers who want to hire and shelters who want to have qualified people experiencing homelessness get back on their feet.”
In some cases that means providing rides to interviews or helping with resumes or building LinkedIn profiles and providing introductions.
The third program is working with what he calls Champions – business, political and community leaders who can help with funding and moving mountains.
“We have a model where we basically, how do I say, collate, or centralize, or bring together superpowers,” Krishnan said. “That, to me, is very similar to open-source. In open-source people come in and contribute. So instead of open-source software, we're being open-source philanthropy.”
Other covenants he brought into the organization from Microsoft include, “know your customer,” which he considers the shelters with which they work; constantly learn from and deliver better programs; build reliable minimum viable products (MVPs); and scale them.
“We want to come up with sort of the lessons learned, we want to make all the mistakes, come up with a road map,” Krishnan said, noting he’s been contacted by people in other cities who’ve heard what they’re doing and want to replicate it. “Here are the steps: find champions, work with shelters, connect with your lawmakers, and then get businesses to contribute. And then you get to critical mass and help. And we can franchise it. Right? That's the idea. It's like, to be able to say, "Hey, take this model. You can have it anywhere in the world."
While that's the goal, Humanize Homelessness is just ramping up. Krishnan said winning the Microsoft Alumni Network's 2019 AlumniHERO award and grant is the first major outside funding the organization has received. He's going to put much thought into how it's spent and maximize what it can do to help meet the nonprofit's needs in its infancy.
Read more about how the organization got started: Go here.
How alumni can act with Krishnan, Jayant, John, Shesh and other alums involved in Humanize Homelessness: If you are compassionate about our cause, let us help you unlock our superpowers, and discover how you can humanize homelessness.
Want to learn more about Humanize Homeless? Go here.