Fatimah Ali: Philadelphia's homeless citizens are still under the radar

THIS Sunday marked World Homeless Awareness Day, the purpose of which was "to draw attention to homeless people's needs locally and to provide opportunities for the community to get involved in responding to homelessness" on the world stage.

Here in Philadelphia, I didn't find one word about the day save in One Step Away, the homeless newspaper that I work for.

Granted, I didn't travel over the entire city on Sunday in search of preachers who may have used their pulpits to address homelessness to honor the day. My quick Internet news search found the Huffington Post ran a flier about the day, and a host of international (but not American) newspapers also popped up.

My mission is to encourage everyone to care about homelessness because so many people are just a paycheck or two away from having the bottom fall out.

Not every homeless person is strung out, uneducated or lazy. Plenty of folks just got a bad break, or had banks that took advantage of them. Many are women with children, even entire families, and we should all be concerned because in one way or another, poverty touches us all.

Still euphoric that our paper was honored with a Community Service Award by the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP last Friday, I enthusiastically embraced World Homeless Awareness Day as an opportunity to spread the word on the issue because I firmly believe that poor people need a much louder voice.

As an experiment, I approached people on the issue on the streets and in stores. I received all sorts of responses. Although most wanted to know how they could help out on the issue or get a copy of One Step Away, some weren't so nice.

One woman refused to look at a copy of the paper, muttering about having a bad day. A man turned his head and showed no compassion at all for the concerns of the homeless. Same thing with one of the ladies behind the counter, who I've talked to on occasion. She was totally uninterested until her colleague insisted she take a look.

This is sad for a country that counts at least 3.5 million homeless people on any given night, and who may have been undercounted in the recent census.

And with the tremendous wave of foreclosures and double-digit unemployment in many cities, homelessness will only get worse before it gets better.

That's why I do the work I do, which addresses the concerns of poor people globally.

In just a little over the two months that I've worked with shelter residents on the paper, I've found two common threads - compassion for each other and for those who may have hurt them, and determination to recover from whatever burdens they've encountered.

Often it's a long and arduous road finding the road back to stability, but it can be done.

These same qualities fuel motivational speaker/author Liz Murray, whose breakout book, "Breaking Night: A Memoir of Survival, My Journey from Homeless to Harvard," was recently released.

In an interview for One Step Away, Murray told me and homeless writer Eric Younge what inspires her is "perseverance and working past the point of when you think that you have nothing left, and digging even deeper to find success."

After completing high school in just two years while living in the New York subways, she staunchly refused victimhood or anger at the dysfunctional, drug-addicted parents who raised her.

After losing them both to AIDS, Murray prevailed, going on to complete a Harvard undergraduate education in 2009.

She's founded her own training company, Manifest Living, and encourages our One Step Away model for self-help. That model came from CEO Bob Fishman of the paper's parent nonprofit, Resources for Human Development, who modeled it after other street newspapers across the country.

THE FORMULA is simple:

Allow people to create their own product (a newspaper about homelessness) and distribute it for donations. Creativity and vision are the keys, and this concept can translate into a corporate model that puts Americans back to work.

And, for every hard-luck story that ends in failure, there are also those who successfully turn their lives around and work miracles for their own self-empowerment.

Fatimah Ali is a regular contributor to the Daily News, development manager for One Step Away and blogs about food at healthysoutherncomforts.com.