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Search & Rescue volunteers provide a helping hand to our homeless community. Photos by Kyle Kesterson.

“When your world is really small, your problems are very big. When your world is really big, your problems are very small.” – David Cole, former CEO of Coinstar/Redbox


Each Tuesday night for the past few months, my world around me, and inside me, has become more vast, layered, and rich with substance and adventure, and it’s started to shape the next chapter of startup culture. I, and others from the startup community, have been going on a homeless Search & Rescue to canvas the city and serve our city’s homeless population by helping provide basic supplies to allow them to survive another day.

Not only do we distribute needed goods, but we give attention, energy, conversation, love, support, light and hope in a very hopeless and dark time. We ask for and try to remember their names. We look them in the eye and ask thoughtful questions. We patiently hear of their stories or rants. We let them see how we interact with each other in a warm and loving way. I might argue that this is more nurturing than the sandwiches and cocoa. Ultimately I believe we aim to remind them that being alive and living is a freak’n awesome gift.

As startup teams come out, they bond amongst themselves on a deeper, human level, while consequently creating a culture of selflessness and immediate impact, not just foosball tables and kegs.

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Homeless men and women sleep under the viaduct, in an area referred to as “Rat City.”

Homelessness is a dense and complicated issue

A couple reasons lead to homelessness — circumstance, addiction, and mental illness. Having shaken hands with and hugged all three, it’s frightening how thin that separating wall can be. Circumstance can happen to any one of us, and it does — it’s what put my own family on the street. Addiction can come from trying to escape the blaring pain and increasing darkness of being hit with circumstances. Mental illness was either always there and was made worse with progressively detrimental decisions, or formed with long-term addictions and abuse.

Hope, endurance, and support is the guiding light out. Hope can still be found if just facing circumstance, but both addiction and mental illness rapidly become a vortex of despair, leaving only a cold, dark, perspective of doom, and requires significantly more effort and resources.

Anyone in this city can make some meaningful impact with it becoming even a slight priority for a limited time, but those of us in the tech community should really be the ones focusing on these issues. We are action-oriented problem-solvers that can build solutions to create positive change at scale.

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Jonathan Sposato helps to make sure this man is fed and acknowledged.

Avoid the trap

As tech booms, salaries go up, exits yield returns, and quality of life increases, the gap between class separation widens. If we’re not mindful to the ramifications of how our city continues to gentrify and make way for more talent, we may see tension and aggression rise, the way San Francisco has fallen victim to.

Turning toward the problem, and not away from it, is surprisingly easy and rewarding. But just like with needing to get as close to the pain of customers to understand and solve their problems, it’s vital to get ourselves into heart of homelessness in the same way. Empathy will unlock answers and compassion, and Search and Rescue is an incredible place to start.

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Under the viaduct along the waterfront, Search & Rescue can serve dozens at just a single stop.

Experiencing Search and Rescue

The volunteers meet at Union Gospel Mission at 7:45 for a quick orientation that highlights what the mission is, what is to be expected, and how to stay safe.

The night starts with simple handshakes and hearing a bunch of names of usually first-time volunteers, half expecting to forget their names in no time at all. By the end of the night, it ends in hugs, recaps of our experiences, and making sure to swap info with your new friends. Startup teams and founders reminisce for days afterwards and talk about the next time they get to go out together.

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Search & Rescue volunteers get to know each other in the van throughout the night.

The beginning always starts the same way. As we hop into the van and head down to the first location near the stadiums, there is a sense of anticipation and excitement about the unknown: “I wonder what it will be like. Will I be safe? Is this hard? What if I don’t know what to say?” When we arrive, a few walk across the street, call out “Union Gospel – Search & Rescue. We have sandwiches, water, hot cocoa, blankets, socks … anything you need?” Hector, and sometimes his family, emerge from the tent, come across the street to the van, and catch us up on the latest gossip. He always ends with “Thank you guys, God bless you.”

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Michael, the man living in his trailer, decided to show his optimism with a painted smiley face, rather than focusing on the anger and despair.

When getting back into the van, the energy is calmer. “Wow, that was pretty easy,” is a common feeling. And at each of the dozen or so stops, we learn more and more about the humans who are living a significantly more difficult life than we are.

We meet Frank who has been homeless for 13 years. After having been a Prisoner of War in Vietnam for 13 months and developing severe PTSD, he can’t find it in him to be inside a closed area, no matter how many times he’s tried. It took years of outreach before he began to accept help from the Search and Rescue volunteers, and now he’s a local favorite.

Kyle Kestersen.
Kyle Kestersen.

Or Michael Anthony, who had a pretty wonderful and normal life until he walked in on his wife and best friend, which led to an escalated altercation and having a gun pulled on him. He managed to get the gun away, shot his best friend, did five years for involuntary manslaughter, and had his whole life ripped away from him.

Or the 13-person Hernandez family who live out of their RV, going up and down the coast finding work throughout the seasons. Or Jenny, who just went missing after her friends found her purse spread out over the parking lot and she hasn’t been seen since. Or Phil who just needs to survive until October 1st to get his check from the VA and get an apartment.

In just a few short weeks of connecting with Phil and watching it get harder for him to just hang on, I put on my “Customer Development” hat and started asking questions until I found other needs he has that we could help with. After dropping off a tent, sleeping bag, ear plugs, hot meals, and just talking with him for about a half hour each time, he said, “You know, I think I’m going to reach out to my brother.” I haven’t seen Phil since. A neighboring homeless man told us that a guy came and picked up Phil and he’s now in an apartment. It was an instant boost of excitement and validation, knowing that a few small efforts can go a long ways towards helping someone change the course of their life.

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One of the most frustrating and heartbreaking things that happens is running out of supplies before getting to our final stops, and having to tell people they have to find another way. We are limited to what is provided to Search and Rescue, although some volunteers have taken it upon themselves to do fundraisers, or pay directly out of pocket to help us get through the night.

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Kyle Kesterson (center), and Bryan Copley (right) from Rebls volunteer with Vince Williams, who was previously homeless until going through the Union Gospel Mission rehabilitation programs.

It changes you

Going home after a night of Search and Rescue, volunteers can find it hard to sleep. Something happens internally, like the moving, growing, and shaping of a house. It’s common to wake up the next morning with an incredibly visceral sense of gratitude and appreciation for all of the people, opportunities, and things that make up your life. It can change the way you connect to people. It can also remove any fear and apathy toward other humans in need that you walk by each day.

Search and Rescue isn’t just going outward to search for and rescue others, but it also serves to be a search and rescue mission for our own sense of self-worth and purpose for our own lives.

There are a few ways you can get involved and create positive impact:

  • This Giftstarter campaign was created to help feed and support over 500 homeless people (all $ goes directly to Search and Rescue)
  • Create a Giftstarter campaign for your own organization or community to support Search and Rescue
  • Donate to the Union Gospel Mission to help with their men, women, and youth shelters, and various programs
  • Schedule a time for you and/or your team to go on Search & Rescue and experience it for yourself (space permitting) – email Kyle@FreaknGenius.com to learn more

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Kyle Kesterson is the Founder and Chief Freak of Freak’n Genius. Having grown up with a period of homelessness, he works to address issues around poverty and at-risk youth, using creativity, storytelling, community, and entrepreneurialism. His other initiative is the SHINE Youth Program which serves to help turn at-risk youth into risk-taking entrepreneurs. Follow and reach out to him on Twitter at @KyleKesterson or email him at Kyle@FreaknGenius.com

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