Tim Boyle, the CEO of Columbia, has provided the funding for an innovative homeless shelter in Portland. Unfortunately, the homeless shelter was not built to simply help the homeless in Portland. It was created when employees expressed concern about the safety of both employees and customers being harassed by homeless people at the downtown store location. It’s intended to attract more Columbia employees to work at the Portland location.
EDIT: It’s probably not genuine, and just feeds into the corporate mentality. But it does have a great outcome!
Having spent a summer up in Seattle which also has a big homeless population, I found this article to be particularly interesting. In Seattle, I took part in quite a few homeless aid endeavors throughout the city. I don’t think it is “unfortunate” at all that one of the reasons that Columbia got involved in building this shelter was to ensure the safety of its employees. Homelessness isn’t something to be ignored or only addressed because it makes you feel uncomfortable, but it does come with some negative aspects that can make areas more dangerous. Desperate situations can lead to more desperate actions. Many of the areas we went to around Seattle were downright dangerous to be in due to the desperate state of the homeless population. There was an instance where one of the women in our group was cornered and yelled at repeatedly by a homeless individual. A few of us had to come around to give her a way out and she was visible shaken up by the experience. We still all came back the next day to help some more.
The CEO of Columbia is just looking out for his employees safety and thinking about the attractiveness of the store. Like it or not, people do not want to walk through an homeless area when they are going to work or shop. Instead of just ignoring the situation, the CEO is taking action to help the situation and a 100-bed facility is being created to help homeless individuals get aid. Personally, it would be great if he was just acting out of the kindness of his heart, but to act in the interest of your employees is reasonable. Even if he is acting from some kind of disdain for homeless people (which we have no evidence of), we are still getting a solid public service out of his actions. Excited to see the shelter go in and I hope that Columbia couples its donation with employee service days in the shelter.
I think the idea is great! It kills two birds with one stone–make the area around his business safe and keep homeless people off the street. I just wish his intentions were pure instead of focusing on whether or not he can recruit employees to run his business.
I’m curious as to why the city isn’t doing anything to lessen the homeless population. It really shouldn’t be up to business owners to keep the streets safe.
I also agree that the idea is great. While the CEO obviously has his own motivations behind helping fund the homeless shelter, I do not think it matters here. At the end of the day, the shelter is extremely beneficial to the community and its members alike. Although, I do agree with Shandice and question whether this type of program is within the CEO’s obligations and duties. Of course, CEO’s should maintain reasonable working conditions for their employees but this program seems like a hefty task to take on as a mere business owner. It could be argued that the implementation of this program simply results in residual positive effects on the community; however, the article does not mention what the city or its officials have done about the homelessness issue in Portland. Moreover, reading this article made me think about how prevalent this issue is throughout this country and how beneficial such programs would be in places like New York City.
While I think that it could be unfortunate if Columbia’s only reason for building the shelter was for selfish motives, I think that the company’s response to the issue is entirely appropriate and commendable. I believe that the CEO’s grant of $1.5 million could not simply have been to bring safety to his employees; there must have been an altruistic motivation there too, otherwise I would assume that there would have been a less expensive alternative. I think that the individualized approach to each homeless person is an important part of this solution. As the group who presented last week mentioned, it is very important to understand that there are a plethora of different reasons why homelessness occurs.
I tend to agree with the rest of the comments. I think it actually benefits everyone for Columbia to have a financial stake in their charity since it makes them more accountable and incentivized. As we saw in class with foreign aid, if the donor is simply donating for the “feel good” aspect, they’ll quickly forget about the people they were trying to help once that aid has been delivered and the credit taken.
By Columbia having an actual financial interest in reducing homelessness, I think they will do a better job than if it was purely altruistic. It may be selfish, but it is also pretty practical and as we’ve seen, that has more potential for lasting impact than the former.
I’m not sure that being concerned for employees well being necessarily takes away from any genuine goodwill on the part of Columbia’s CEO. You can be concerned about public safety, and sincerely want to help the homeless at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive. If anything, I credit their CEO for being honest, as it kinda annoys me when people try to cloak self-serving behavior as something else. Seems to me he’s just being pragmatic about the situation.
Addressing his employees concerns doesn’t take away from the goodwill. I think the company in general treats its employees great! It’s the fact that he didn’t care about those that are less fortunate until it affected his ability to recruit employees to work at this location. As I said, the outcome is great.
The Mayor of Los Angeles has also recently announced that L.A. will take several new measures to combat the increasing challenges of homelessness in the city. A link to an article discussing further can be found below. The issue of homelessness is such a sad problem to continue to see in the 21st century and perhaps an entrepreneurial approach is needed to rethink how it can be addressed.
One quote from the article: “The mayor detailed his plan to fund new tents, trailers and other forms of emergency shelter — a program he is calling A Bridge Home — as he seeks to rally communities to ‘confront the greatest moral and humanitarian crisis of our time.'”
See the article here: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-garcetti-state-of-city-20180416-story.html