Humanity for the homeless

Justin Doering has been traveling the U.S. for the past three months, listening to what the nation’s homeless population has to say.

His goal with the project, Fifty Sandwiches, is to humanize the homeless. He approaches people living on the street or in homeless shelters and offers to buy them a sandwich if they’ll share their story with him.

“Think Humans Of New York from the unheard and unknown, with a touch of narrative to make the reader feel like they are the ones sitting down for a chat,” Doering wrote in an email to The Press in April.

Doering said the idea came to him in high school when he started visiting a homeless shelter in Coeur d’Alene twice a week with one of his mentors. During his time there he realized the people he met didn’t match the stereotypical profiles of a homeless person.

The Coeur d’Alene native and recent Boise State University graduate raised some money, bought a van, Milo, and hit the road in August to meet people who are otherwise invisible.

His travels started in Coeur d’Alene and led to the West Coast. He made his way down Washington, Oregon and California before cutting across Arizona and Texas to the deep south in Louisiana and Florida. After that he found his way up the eastern United States and is currently spending some time in New York City.

During his travels, Doering has only endured a few sketchy situations. Milo died a few times and when he was in Arizona, and he got lost in Zion Canyon overnight. But other than that, he said it’s been pretty smooth sailing.

Doering said he has interviewed about 56 people in the three months he has been on the road. By the time he gets home for Thanksgiving, he plans to have conducted more than 100 interviews.

“Every interview has been incredibly surprising to me, the stories behind the faces, because you never really know who you’re talking to,” Doering said. “One that stood out to me was Ian [from Portland, Ore.]. He was just incredibly polite and mild-mannered and soft-spoken when he was talking to me, but his story went on and on about one tragic thing that happened to him to the next.”

The culmination of these stories will be turned into a book. Doering hopes to have it published sometime next year.

“The true goal of the project is to identify the diversity of the homeless population,” he said. “I think that really does enough to show anyone can fall into this. It’s a slippery slope and it’s incredibly hard to get out of; a lot of these people have had tragedy or a major barrier that has brought them to this point.”

Throughout his travels, Doering has been blogging and posting interviews to his website: fiftysandwiches.com.