A 16-page pocket guide for people who just became homeless in Orange County. Free to download, free to print, free to hand out.
Prints on two sheets of letter paper. Folds and staples into a booklet the size of a passport.
Most homeless resources are lists of phone numbers and offices. This is not one of those. It is a sequence, in the order the steps actually have to happen, and every page names the thing most likely to stop you.
It is built around one finding: a mailing address comes before everything. Without one, no benefit card, no birth certificate and no ID can reach you, no matter what else you do.
The guide gets a reader to six things, in this order:
With all six, a person can take a job, rent a room, open a bank account and be reached. Without them they cannot, however hard they work.
No permission needed and no attribution required. Print one for someone you know, or five hundred for a congregation.
At a copy shop: print the booklet file double-sided, flipped on the long edge, at 100% — not scaled to fit. Cut along the dashed line, nest the halves in order, fold, and put two staples on the fold.
Use the single-pages file if you are sending it to a commercial printer, who will impose it themselves.
It is written for someone who is newly homeless, can read, and is able to follow steps. That is a real and badly served group, and it is not everybody.
It does nothing for untreated mental illness or addiction, it cannot conjure a shelter bed that does not exist, and it will not help a person who needs someone beside them rather than a book in their pocket. Anything claiming to work for everyone would be worth distrusting.
Caseworkers, outreach workers, librarians, and anyone who has lived this: if something in here is out of date or simply untrue, tell us and the next printing gets fixed.
Every copy carries a printed date, so you can tell which edition you are holding.