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A Syracuse University freshman is leading the Helpful and Ethical Leadership Project, an initiative that aims to provide direct and indirect aid to homeless and impoverished people. In addition to helping individual homeless people, the organization plans to address systemic issues that contribute to homelessness.

Lucio Maffei said that in the next four years, HELP hopes to work with city and state legislators to increase substance abuse and mental health resources to help people stay healthy and avoid homelessness in the first place.

“(Homelessness is) not just poverty, not just mental health, not just veteran relationships,” Maffei said. “It’s everything combined. It’s race, it’s ethnicity, it’s income. It’s not something you can just throw money at. You need to have a very specific approach, a very specific mission.”

HELP has 80 members split into marketing, fundraising and aid committees. The committees aim to raise money and volunteer with local nonprofit soup kitchens and shelters, host coat drives and raise awareness for safe places homeless people can receive shelter and food.

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General members started meeting on Zoom twice a month in February, once to brainstorm ideas with individual committees and once to review what has been accomplished each month. In addition to working with nonprofit organizations off campus, the club plans to create advertising and video campaigns this semester to combat the stigmas of homelessness, secretary Maya Fuller said.

Fuller herself has had friends and family members affected by homelessness. While the common misconception is that homeless people or those living in poverty are lazy, that’s not the case, she said.

“The majority of people I know who lived below the poverty line have been the hardest working people I’ve ever met,” Fuller said. “And their circumstance put them in a place that they can’t really escape from.”

Because HELP launched at the beginning of his second semester, Maffei felt surprised by the high amount of interest. It’s easy for students to feel distant from current social issues while living on a college campus, but HELP members hope to educate other students on homelessness.

David Sobel, an ethics and political philosophy professor at SU and the faculty adviser for HELP, expressed that the first step is education.

“It’s a mistake to think that a good education isolates you from the world around you,” Sobel said. “A good education should arm you to better understand how to make the world a better place.”

Published on March 17, 2021 at 11:32 pm