Week 7: Where do the stories come from?

The stories of homeless people that appear in the website are all based on true stories of homeless people that I discovered during my research over Easter. Although the stories appearing in the website are not the real stories of any homeless person in particular (I changed the locations, added some details to the story, etc...), they are all based on research I did about homelessness, the profiles of homeless people and my own experience as a volunteer with homeless people in Madrid. What I tried to do with those four stories was also to present the diversity of the homeless community, how many different stories and different people with different backgrounds form the homeless community, trying to show a wide range of aspects of homelessness.

Here are the four references for the four stories that appear in the website:

1- Belinda's story

Belinda's story is based on the story presented in the film "The Florida project", where a mother live with her daughter in a motel room in Florida, near Disneyworld, because they have nowhere else to go.

2- Ashley's story

Ashley's story is based on the documentary "The hidden homelessness crisis in California"(VICE/HBO) where the story of a women that lives in her car with her daughter and her dog is presented. She moved there with her daughter to study at university, but the lack of affordable housing made her having to choose between university and a house, and she chose to live in a car to be able to keep studying at university.

3- Bruce's story

Bruce's story is inspired by a The Guardian's video where is presented the story of a young man who fled domestic violence at home and ended up having to sleep in shelters, and then helped by Centerpoint (an NGO). He left his home and his family and had nowhere to go.

4- Spencer's story

Spencer's story is inspired by my volunteering experience at Madrid, where I met a man with whom other volunteers and me worked, that had fallen into the world of drugs some years ago, which led him to loose the job he had and end up in the streets. When I met him he was starting to recover from his addiction thanks to the help of Madrid's social services.