Your Helpful Neighbor

"Your Helpful Neighbor" started as a service business of home and grounds care primarily to senior citizens who wanted to keep living in their own home and needed assistance with the basics of home and grounds care. After about 21 years, I stopped serving in that way and have focused on serving people who have Substance Use Disorder, are in the active use phase of it and are homeless on the streets of Kensington.

I stopped using the name "Your Helpful Neighbor" but am starting to use it again. Here's why. When I looked up each word in Google, I found a description of what I've been doing on the streets and what I need your continued support and involvement to do:

"Your Helpful Neighbor"

Your: refers to something that belongs to or relates to the person who is being spoken to

The people of the streets of Kensington are equally human to you and me. Sometimes, through stigmas attached to addiction, we forget that. Looking at each man and woman as a man or woman reminds us that they are worthy of dignity, honor, respect and love and whatever services we can provide so as to support their efforts to get beyond their current substance use and homelessness and move back into healthy living.

Helpful: providing or willing to provide assistance, information, or other aid

There are many resources available to achieve this goal. A person dealing with drug use that is resulting in homelessness is in a weakened state: emotionally, spiritually, and physically. As a helper, we can come alongside each person and do what we can so as to support and guide as they determine the next best steps for their lives.

Neighbor: somebody who lives next door or close to somebody else

Even if we grasp the fact that the men and women of the streets are actually that - men and women - many outsiders to the issue still fall into the misunderstanding that these people are someone else's resident.

Regardless of where you live, most of the people living on the streets of Kensington are our former ACTUAL neighbors who went to our local schools, drove on our streets, shopped in our stores, attended our places of worship and played in our local parks. 

So, with those thoughts in mind, I say to you, my friends on the streets: "I am doing all that I know to do to be "Your Helpful Neighbor".

And to you, the reader of this writing, I say this: Your Neighbors Need You To Be Helpful!