Problem
In Germany the are currently 330.000 homeless people. Most of these people live on the fringe and have many problems. After some research you can find many organisations that help homeless people. Most of them distribute food for free or have an accommodation to stay the night. Also, they have the possibility to stow private things. You can see that many ''basic needs'' and ''security needs'' are satisfied. So we can focus on the ''social need'.(Maslow's hierarchy of needs)
The main problem is that all these organisations do not solve the problem of homelessness, because they do not fix the central issue. But this is necesarry to solve the problem permanently.
So homeless people have to get the chance to be a part of our society, if we want to help them to find back into social life. The motto: Helping people to help themselves.
To achieve this the homless need a source of income. They need something like a job!
You can see that this can work well, if you take a look at the newspaper which are sold by homeless people.
Nevertheless, the main idea is not to sell something. The goal is to help homeless people to become a part of our society again. So the idea is to dispose deposite bottles for a good cause.
Solution
The solution is to eastablish a collection system for deposit bottles, with the aim to give homeless people an income and to integrate them into our society.
Helping people to help themselves is the main idea, because they only can escape from homelessness, if they become a part of a social and active live.
Implementation
We want to create a pseudo-company named “PFAND FLOTTE” (eng: “deposit bottle fleet”). The homeless people can work there as official collectors of deposit bottles. They pick up the bottles at the froontdoor, like the garbage collection. So the homless people get the deposit and so they have contact with the society. This task is something like a job, because the homeless get the deposit, sothat they earn their own money. This concept should be organized from the Caritas. Also the Caritas ensures that everything is correct and all people involved are satisfied
How it work's
We distribute flyers in mailboxes. These flyers look like a bottle, so we called it “Flaschenpost” (eng: “Message in a Bottle”). The flyer explains how the PFAND FLOTTE works und where you can find more information.
But this Flyer is also a marking for the homless people. If they see the flyer, they know that this people want to donate their bottles. The collection day will be saturday. Our plan is to establish that saturday is “deposite bottle day”.
In between, we will distribute personal letter of thanks. We want to achieve that people who support our idea get serious feedback.
Online
On the website you can find more detailed information. Time after time there will be interviews with homeless people who are a part of the PFAND FLOTTE. These interviews will show how the homeless people think about this kind of job and how it changed their live.
Web spots
To make the idea public, there will be short and funny videos, which will be published on the internet.
Mostly these spots will show, that disposit bottles can be a bit of a bind.
Social Media
On social media platforms there will be many information and new content as well. Because of the spots, other people will post ther funny pictures with deposite bottles and their problems.
Equipment
All materials and the equipment on one view. It is very important, that the look of PFAND FLOTTE is serious and friendly, because the people have to accept this system.
This work was a coorperation with: Maximilian Schröer (KD), Kirsten Winkels (PD), Katja Fuchs (PD)