Give a buck, or give up?

Early this summer, a concern among some local businesses about increased panhandling led City Council to further restrict begging on the Downtown Mall, despite an absence of police citations for such problems. Now, panhandling citations are up on the Mall, while a program developed by the Downtown Business Association (DBA) and the Thomas Jefferson Area Coalition for the Homeless (TJACH) to redirect giving efforts to The Haven day shelter is on hiatus.

“We’re not walking away. We’ll still continue to talk to them and try to figure something out,” says Bob Stroh, co-chair of the DBA. “To be honest, I just can’t figure out where to go from here.”

In June, TJACH Executive Director Kaki Dimock sent Stroh a list of panhandling campaigns for cities like Denver, Colorado, and Calgary, Alberta. (The Calgary Downtown Association ran an ad that included the phrase “Your generosity is killing me.”) Cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Portland, Oregon, installed parking meters to collect donations of change, but met with mixed results; Portland’s Business Alliance raised more than $10,000 for area nonprofits, while two meters in Chattanooga were stolen.

Members of the DBA met with TJACH’s Service Provider Council to develop a campaign to direct donations to The Haven through participating Downtown businesses, rather than giving to panhandlers. While neither side seemed to debate the giving model, the language in many of the campaign materials was “too strongly worded,” according to Dimock. On October 20, the groups reconvened to discuss the campaign and ended the meeting in a stalemate.

At the meeting, Stroh and two other DBA representatives distributed campaign materials for discussion. The materials bore the message “Support the homeless, not panhandling”—a word that proved a dealbreaker for Dimock and members of the Service Provider Council.

“There were places where we had lines in the sand,” says Dimock of TJACH’s response. “The word ‘panhandling’ is one of those lines.” 

For Dimock and the service provider council, the campaign failed to adequately educate the public about efforts to assist the area’s homeless population, and the word “panhandling” can be both pejorative and vague, as it applies to the Haven’s work with the homeless. 

For Stroh, however, the word “panhandling” makes the campaign clear. “If certain words aren’t acceptable, then how in the world do you describe what the issue is?” he asks.

The pattern of panhandling citations on the Downtown Mall is enough to raise a few cause-and-effect questions. Between 2008 and mid-July 2010, police issued nine aggressive panhandling citations in Charlottesville, but none on the Downtown Mall. The next month, City Council agreed to prohibit panhandling within 50′ of the Second and Fourth street intersections, and near banks and Mall vendors.

At the same time—and for the first time in years—the Downtown Mall saw a sudden rise in aggressive panhandling citations. City police report that, since C-VILLE’s feature, three citations were issued, each on the Mall—at the 300 and 500 blocks of E. Main, and the 200 block of W. Main, near the recently reopened Main Street Arena.

The DBA and Service Providers Council agreed to pursue further talks, and both Dimock and Stroh expressed an eagerness to work together. “I think the public tends to try to pit the Downtown businesses against The Haven or other homelessness [service] providers,” says Dimock. “As individuals, it did not feel like that.”

In the meantime, Dimock says that The Haven recently started its first mobile giving program, so locals may donate $10 to the shelter by texting “Haven” to 52000.

“Both the Mobile Giving Foundation and the service providers charge a set-up fee, and the service providers charge an additional monthly service fee,” says Dimock. “As a result, it is important for participating nonprofits to generate as many texted donations as possible.”