By Haley Clough
Boston Common Coalition for the Homeless (BCCH) is a student-run mutual aid organization based out of Emerson College. The founder, Adam Nunez, is a journalism major at Emerson. Nunez created the coalition as a student interest group, with the hope of making a positive impact for the unhoused community in the Boston area.
“We just want to make sure that we can distribute material aid effectively to communities that are in need. As long as we can do that in a way that is responsible, as long as we can do that in a way that is effective and doesn’t waste peoples’ time, it’s a job well done,” Nunez said.
The homelessness crisis and the economy has consistently been a relevant issue, in Boston and nationally. Roughly 12,600 people in Boston are unhoused. In the United States, that number is over 650,000 homeless, according to the Office of Policy Development and Research. Boston’s per capita homelessness, approximately 800 unhoused to every 100,000 residents, is second nationally, behind New York City’s 1,000 homeless per 100,000.
Nunez said the homelessness epidemic in the United States is one of ideology. “We [in this country] view owning property as an investment,” he said. Large multinational corporations and real estate entities purchase land to sell, much of which is low income properties: section eight housing, trailer parks, and apartment complexes. Nunez said that all these companies care about is “making profit. That is directly in contradiction with what should be a human right, which is housing and shelter.”
Nunez’s organization has committed itself to making a positive impact towards Boston’s unhoused community. Since its inception in the winter of last year, BCCH has put together several actions. The group does biweekly distributions, which entail taking food, toiletries, and other necessities to various locations across the city to hand out to people who are homeless. BCCH also has a free store, another opportunity for people to take what they need.
“We’ll sit here and wonder, how does homelessness happen and why do we have such a crisis outside…[but we] can understand ways to make it better as well if we put some effort in,” Nunez said. “There are many of us at the school that felt this way…We wanted to do distributions, we wanted to get material aid out to the people of Boston, we wanted to educate and change the rhetoric around homelessness on campus and change the way people saw homelessness criminalization.”
He says there are several harmful misconceptions towards homelessness that causes the issue to worsen. People believe that all homeless people are addicted to drugs, or are mean. For Nunez, this is not the case. “We’ve dealt with mean people, it is what it is… If we lived on the street we’d probably be in a bad mood most of the time…But for the most part, people are so thankful, they’re so grateful. They tell stories, they share art with us,” he shared, noting one particular instance while on a walking distribution where somebody shared a poem they wrote with the group.
Roughly 38% of unhoused individuals have abused alcohol, and 26% have struggled with drug use, according to American Addiction Centers. Nunez said in his experience, the prejudice towards the homeless community portrays it like the majority are drug addicts, and that the perception of substance abuse as a personal failing needs to be changed.
Nunez hopes that this year is only more fruitful for BCCH when it comes to distributions and building membership in the organization. More than that, BCCH intends “to be louder and have more actionable statements and events.”
“The only way, as we know, to stop anything we don’t want in politics or in a system, is people power,” he said. “It’s the idea of getting enough people together that oppose it, and to organize against it. We’ve been very lucky to see certain movements grow in history, and now, but this is the movement that needs to grow now as well.”
