#pushforchange

Canada is one of the largest countries in the world, spanning six times zones from coast-to-coast. A cross-country journey is usually made by plane, by car, or sometimes even by train. Rarely does one attempt to travel on foot. But that's exactly what Joe Roberts has set out to do.

On May 1, Joe will begin a 9,000 kilometre trek across Canada pushing a shopping cart along the way to raise awareness and money for youth homelessness.

After four-and-a-half years of planning and 6,000 kilometres of training walks, Joe says he’s ready for his 17-month Push for Change challenge and is confident that he and his small crew will make it to the finish line.

Joe’s ambitious endeavour embodies his life story of overcoming adversity and beating the odds. Known today as the Skid Row CEO, he went from being a homeless youth battling drug addiction to becoming a successful businessman and millionaire in his mid-thirties.

Although Joe’s life has changed dramatically, his memories of being homeless and living under Vancouver’s Georgia Viaduct are never far away. Having experienced the challenges of being homeless at a young age, he wants to make sure at-risk and homeless youth get a chance at a better life, just like he did.

For the last two decades, he has been an avid spokesperson for youth homelessness prevention. Through Push for Change, he hopes to raise $18 million — that's 50 cents from every Canadian. All money raised will go towards the Upstream Project, a collaborative, charitable venture with the long-term goal to install screening programs in every Canadian school to prevent young people from falling through the cracks.

We talked to Joe about Push for Change, his own experience with homelessness and how to turn setbacks into opportunities.

On the idea for Push for Change: I was working with sports psychologist Dr. Sean Richardson and I asked him, what can we do to raise awareness and really have a conversation with people across Canada? He said, “Joe, you used to push a shopping cart around the Downtown Eastside. Why don’t you push a shopping card across Canada? It’s a symbol of chronic homelessness, the thing you’re trying to avoid for young people.” That’s where the idea came from.

On inspiration: Terry Fox inspires me, but I also want to be careful not to compare what I’m doing to what he did, because Terry gave everything, but what I do admire is that he gave Canadians a template to raise awareness and money.

I believe that human beings are at their finest when they’re helping others. I look up to Terry, and I look up to Rick [Hansen] and I look up to the men and women that work on the frontline. They help the kids and homeless folks across this country and I’m inspired to do my little part to contribute.

On becoming a homeless youth: I was a typical kid from a typical middle class family. We lost dad when I was at a young age. My stepfather was an abusive alcoholic. In the shadow of that I started using drugs when I was nine. By the time I was 15 I left home. At 16 I left school and at 17 I was in jail. When I was 18 or 19 I left Ontario to come to Vancouver.

I didn’t have the skill set as a young person to manage on my own. I was 5,000 kilometres away from home and I was in Vancouver and my drug abuse escalated. I found myself doing cocaine and heroin and within a short period of time I was living underneath the Georgia Street Viaduct. At my worst, I was one of those folks that you see pushing a shopping cart around the Downtown Eastside. I collected cans and bottles to support my drug dependency.

Fortunately for me, I had family support. I had a mom that wouldn’t quit on me and so I had the opportunity to come back to Ontario and join treatment, go back to college, graduate and 12 years after I first got clean I was a successful entrepreneur.

On getting ready: In the summer of 2012 I walked from Calgary to Vancouver.

We learned about all the physical challenges, how to manage my body, about equipment, how to operate out of a vehicle.

I’ve probably done 6,000 kilometres of training, so I know what my body can do and there are no surprises.

On being ready: We’ve got everything that we’ve envisioned four years ago in place. We’re fully funded. I’m looking at a brand new truck in my driveway right now. It’s wrapped with advertising for our sponsors. There’s 50 pairs of sneakers ready to go. Everything has come together.

I just finished an 18-kilometre walk this morning, so I’m a little flat, but I’m just looking forward to the starting line, getting to Newfoundland, getting the first three to four hundred kilometres done and getting into the rhythm of things.

On roadblocks: We hit a thousand roadblocks in developing the Push for Change. We had to cover operational costs and we had to get some influential people to come on board to support us, but through being resilient and connecting to the reason why we’re doing this work, we’ve overcome those roadblocks.

We had to raise $1 million. Who’s going to give a million dollars to someone to push a shopping cart across Canada? Now, if you listen to reason, reason would say: ‘Go home. This is crazy. This is ridiculous.’ But me and my team said we’re going to do it anyways and we’re going to find a way to do it.

On overcoming challenges: When emotion or circumstances get us down, if we get discouraged or depressed, often we get out of action. The secret to success isn’t opportunity, it’s relentless action. So take the next step and find purpose, the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, whatever it is. There’s no shortage of things in the world to connect to. When you do things that have connection and purpose, then the actions become easier.

On donations for the cause: 100% of the money we’re going to raise, minus processing fees, goes to the cause. We’re fully funded so all operational costs are covered: our expenses, our lodging, the gas, the insurance, all the things that we need to operate this 17-month event have come from our sponsors.

On Walk with Joe: We’re giving people an opportunity to walk with me for up to six kilometres at the end of my day and raise money for the cause. We ask people to raise $1,000 per kilometre, so up to $6,000 total.

On goals: Our fundraising goal is 50 cents out of every Canadian and a total of $18 million.

Our long-term goal for the Push for Change is that we want to see high school screening programs in every single school in the nation. When applied to other communities we’ve seen reductions in youth homelessness as high as 35% to 40%, because the issues are dealt with before the kids cycle out.

We also want to raise awareness and talk about what youth homelessness is and what it isn’t. Where do young people become vulnerable? Where do we as society need to invest? Because if we don’t think about these questions we’ll continue to have a chronic homelessness problem in Vancouver, Toronto and around the world. It’s a problem that has no sunset if we don’t invest in prevention models.

On prevention: When you look at homelessness there are three areas that you can invest in: prevention, emergency services and long-term sustainable housing.

The one thing we don’t do as good a job at in Canada and the developed world is investing in prevention. We spend a lot of time and energy working on the problem — and I’m not saying that’s wrong. We need to support emergency services, but from a fiscal point of view, dollars invested in prevention take the burden of emergency services, like health care, policing, corrections. It’s just smart investment. It makes a lot more sense to spend money helping a young person when they are in Grade 9 or 10 and they are having a crisis instead of dealing with them when they are in the welfare system at 22 years old living in the DTES, because by the time somebody is homeless and has been on the street for a year or two, it becomes a lot more difficult to deal with the issues at hand.  

On the Upstream Project: Think about it as a screening process. If every kid in, let’s say, John Oliver High School in Vancouver were under the Upstream Project, every single kid would be assessed through a piece of software that manages key pieces of information that are indicators of potential problems like attendance, grade points and anything else teachers might notice. Once the program identifies somebody in the top quadrant for at risk, it provides wrap around services to help support that young person in their time of need.

Push for Change is a funding partner of the Upstream Project. The project itself is administered by Raising the Roof, our charitable partner. Raising the Roof will then pilot 2, 5, 10 or 25 cities with the Upstream Project, collect the data through our other two partners, the Homeless Hub and A Way Home.

And then we take that data and take that evidence to the government and say “Look. We spent a million dollars on this school district. We prevented 555 kids from entering homelessness. That saved your government $3.2 million, so we netted you $3.2 million. How about we roll this out across Canada?”  

It’s a long journey, but it’s worth it.