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For Christmas this year, my dad and step mother donated money in my name to World Vision, a charity that's involved with, among other things, delivering medicine to children in need who are living in impoverished areas of the planet. I thanked them for the thoughtful gift, and I'm grateful of course, but it occurred to me that the money they donated, while helpful on a small scale, was treating the symptom and not the problem. Like the homeless problem in Oregon, apparently, the problem is not needing medicine or needing shelter, but rather the extreme poverty that comes with the territory of wealth inequality.
It's not like all the people who show up to your church are incapable of working in any way. A few may have emotional or neurological problems, but if your experience working with the homeless was anything like mine, most homeless people could hold down a job, pay bills, and contribute to society if given the opportunity. Their biggest hurdle is unemployment and what little employment they have a shot at is super low-wage. When I was working downtown, the best thing we had was to put people into job training, but in 2010 even that's a long shot.
I guess my long-winded answer is that to more abstractly deal with the homeless problem one must fix the American banking system, put in place a more progressive tax system, have more social programs for job training, have more public works, and correct problems with global trade.
More practically, I think, you should see what job-training opportunities there are in the area. If parishioners have a few extra dollars this season, maybe you could help to pay for job training or to at least locate easy seasonal work. You can call it the "Teach a Man to Fish" program or something.
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