About this episode

Gwendolyn Dolske interviews Karen Olson about the realities of homelessness and the importance of viewing homeless individuals as friends rather than problems.

In this episode of Good Is In The Details , Gwendolyn Dolske sits down with Karen Olson — founder and CEO emeritus of Family Promise , a national nonprofit organization dedicated to helping homeless and low-income families, whose organization has trained and mobilized over one million volunteers over the past thirty years to provide services to homeless families, and author of Meant for More: Following Your Heart and Finding Your Purpose, to have the conversation about homelessness that most people are too uncomfortable, too misinformed, or too distant to have. The myths Karen dismantles in this conversation: The homeless are lazy. The homeless are addicted and choose not to get help. Homelessness is an individual failure rather than a systemic one. The people on the street are strangers with no history and no future. Karen has spent thirty years learning the truth. Family Promise has helped more than a quarter of a million people annually, and in that work Karen has come to know her clients the way most of us know our neighbors: by name, by story, by the specific combination of circumstances and choices and bad luck and systemic failure that brought them to where they are. She…

People in this episode

Host: Gwendolyn Dolske

Guest: Karen Olson

Topics covered

• homelessness
• nonprofit organizations
• systemic issues
• volunteerism
• personal stories

Keywords

• homeless crisis
• Family Promise
• volunteers
• systemic failure
• personal stories

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Family Promise

Books & works: Meant for More: Following Your Heart and Finding Your Purpose

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