Nonviolent Communication and Homelessness:
Reclaiming Your Humanity in a System Designed to Forget It

by Alan Rafael Seid, CNVC Certified Trainer

The deeper I look into homelessness the more complex it appears.

Each and every situation of homelessness is unique, and they all include internal and external factors.

Internal factors can include things like trauma, low skills, lack of confidence, low self-esteem, a sense of worthlessness, addiction, mental challenges such as impaired executive function, and so forth.

External factors can include things like medical bankruptcy, generational poverty, physical disabilities, home foreclosure, and so on.

The mix of internal and external factors — and the interplay between them — is unique to each situation.

When you add to that the systemic forces that perpetuate homelessness it becomes even more complex.

In this article I look at how the modality known as Nonviolent Communication interfaces with homelessness and equips practitioners to make a difference.

Nonviolent Communication, or NVC, is a powerful process for having clarity about your intentions and motivations, understanding others’ deeper needs, and making clear requests including setting healthy boundaries.

As you grow in NVC you develop a remarkable capacity to connect with others in order to create mutually beneficial outcomes.

If there is a process that can do all this (and more!) how would we use it to move the needle on a complex and intractable social issue such as homelessness?

While my focus is on the US context, my intention is for this article to be relatable and relevant across cultures and geographical regions.

Homelessness as a Human Emergency, Not a Character Flaw

No one wakes up thinking, “I would like to become homeless today!”

Each person’s life contains complex internal and external factors that can lead to becoming unhoused.

Long-term Risk

Being unhoused negatively impacts safety, health, and longevity.

Studies estimate that upon becoming homeless a person’s lifespan can decline anywhere from 15 to 30 years.

Homelessness Is a Lose-Lose Proposition

Homelessness is lose-lose-lose: nobody wins.

Homeless people suffer.

Many communities and neighborhoods would rather not have to see homeless people.

For the compassionate and open-hearted — and especially for those who work with unhoused populations — the daily exposure to tragedy comes with an emotional toll. Without consistent empathic and grief-work support this toll can lead to an “empathy deficit,” numbing out, and developing a hardened emotional exterior in order to remain functional.

Law enforcement is ill-equipped to interact with people who are unhoused — something better suited to social workers and mental health experts — diverting police resources from where they are most needed.

Neither local businesses nor local government benefit from homelessness.

Everyone — almost everyone — is affected negatively.

Who Benefits from Homelessness?

While homelessness overwhelmingly harms people and communities, some sectors do receive indirect, and in some cases ironic (one might say perverse), benefits from its existence.

These “benefits” are generally financial or political, not social or ethical, and they do not outweigh the overwhelming public costs.

Many of these sectors are sincerely trying to respond to a problem — but the built-in incentives can also unintentionally perpetuate that very same problem.

Some of the sectors that benefit indirectly from homelessness include:

Public and Emergency Systems

Emergency rooms, jails, and police often see higher activity from people experiencing homelessness. This can be used to justify larger budgets, staffing, and infrastructure for these agencies.

Short-term emergency shelters and crisis-response systems can become permanent budget lines for organizations whose existence depends on homelessness remaining a large, visible issue. Again, the original intention was probably to serve — but now there is a tension between eradicating homelessness and organizational survival.

Service and Housing Industries

For-profit vendors who run shelters, security services, and some contracted housing or motel programs may receive steady paychecks from government contracts tied to homelessness. They are offering something of value to help alleviate a problem — but again, these services address a symptom rather than the root cause, and would likely be financially impacted if homelessness were permanently solved.

Consulting, research, and nonprofit sectors can grow around managing homelessness — planning, evaluation, and program delivery — creating jobs that exist because the problem persists, even though their mission is to reduce it.

Real Estate and Local Politics

Visible encampments and shelter crowding can be used rhetorically to oppose zoning changes or new affordable housing in certain neighborhoods, protecting high property values for existing owners.

Some political actors can gain by using homelessness as a wedge issue — arguing for tougher policing or deregulation instead of structural housing reforms — harnessing public frustration to get votes or influence.

Why these “benefits” are misleading

Studies show that stable housing and Housing First models (see below) reduce crime, jail use, and emergency service demand — cutting public costs substantially compared with leaving people homeless.

When people are housed, communities gain increased employment, better health, and reduced strain on local systems, which far outweigh any narrow gains tied to ongoing homelessness.

Dangerous thinking and attitudes that increase stigma

There is a strain of thinking and attitudes toward unhoused people that I find particularly troubling.

Here are some of its elements:

Providence and fate: If I believe that “God” is in charge of all events, then God intended for this person to be homeless. This type of thinking can lead me to become numb to the suffering of others as “God’s plan” and “how it was meant to be” taking away an avenue for meet individuals with compassion and any urgency to change unfair systems and structures.

Human depravity and sin: Homelessness is often blamed on the unhoused person as a reflection of their deficient moral character.

If I believe that work ethic alone overcomes everything, that will likely fuel the suspicion that people are unhoused because they are lazy, wasteful, or poor money managers.

This type of thinking can lead to attitudes that stigmatize an already tragic situation in someone’s life:

Moralizing homelessness: When homelessness is interpreted
primarily as the result of personal sin or bad choices, unhoused people can then be viewed as morally inferior, “reaping what they sowed,” — and this is used as justification for making help heavily conditional or withholding it altogether.

Conditional care: Some programs influenced by this outlook tie food, beds, or services to visible compliance with rules, gratitude, or participation in religious activities, which can lead to favoritism toward “meek” or deferential clients and harsher treatment toward those who think independently or struggle to conform.

Suspicion of “dependency”: The fear of encouraging laziness or “enabling” irresponsible behavior leads some people to be reluctant to support low-barrier shelters or long-term assistance, arguing that unconditional aid traps people in their situation.

Let your compassion be your barometer.

Notice in your own thinking any beliefs that would lead you to turn away, close your heart, refuse to witness, or justify or excuse others’ suffering.

A Predictable System

Homelessness represents a symptom of sorts.

Even if we were to effectively address all the internal factors — education, skills, addiction recovery, attitudinal shifts, self-esteem and self-care, motivation and ambition, and so forth — the external factors remain.

We live within systems and structures, inherited from past generations, that perpetuate the polarization of wealth: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Because of capitalism’s built-in tendency for financial capital to concentrate, we live in an economy in which money trickles up, not down.

In order to effectively tackle the human tragedy of homelessness, we need to steer away from blaming, pathologizing, and polarizing — and begin to understand homelessness as a widespread emergency of unmet human needs within a fairly predictable system.

A Short Refresher on Nonviolent Communication (NVC)

NVC has helped me understand that when I meet my needs at the expense of another’s needs, in the long run my needs are also not met.

Any time I create a win-lose situation, in the long run I also lose.

NVC is based on the understanding that all human beings have the same core human motivators — also called universal human needs — that are essential for anyone to thrive.

These include, but go beyond, survival needs, to encompass things such as trust, belonging, touch, intimacy, creative expression, love, and so on.

For reference, here is a handout with lists of universal feelings and needs.

The NVC Model vs. NVC Consciousness

NVC has a consciousness — you can think of it as a core intention — as well as a concrete framework and “tools” with which you can develop valuable skills.

NVC consciousness recognizes that if we can connect meaningfully, then we are much more likely to be able to find a mutually beneficial outcome.

The Model

On the framework side — what some people refer to as the NVC Model — we have three areas where you can put your attention in the service of connection.

1. Self-connection: helps me be clear about my feelings, needs, and wants — and develop self-understanding and self-compassion.
2. Empathy: is the compassionate presence that I bring to others, so that I can listen to understand rather than merely listen to respond.
3. Honesty: in which I bring my vulnerable self to a conversation, making it easier for another to connect to my heart.

Each of these three areas also has the same four components: observation, feeling, need, and request.

NVC teaches me to pay attention to these four areas of information:

• Observations: What are the neutral facts, separate from my story, my interpretations, evaluations, and judgments?
• Feelings: What are the sensations in my body, feelings, and emotions that can (1) serve as an indicator that something deeper is happening, and (2) help another understand my experience? In NVC we differentiate between feelings and expressions that sound like feelings but are actually expressing a thought, such as “I feel that you’re being mean.”
• Needs: Refer to universal human needs — how Life is seeking to show up in this moment.
• Requests: Asking for that which would enrich my life, as differentiated from demands, which end up harming relationships.

Remember: there is an important difference between having a tool and being skillful with a tool.

Each of these elements: self-connection, empathy, honesty — as well as the four components — offer opportunities to build skillfulness with the tools.

NVC Consciousness

The purpose of NVC is to create a high quality of connection out of which people naturally and spontaneously enjoy contributing to one another’s well-being.

The core intention is to connect — understanding that even out of minimal connection we are much more likely to arrive at mutually agreeable solutions.

When we understand (not agree with!) each others’ perspectives and can demonstrate that understanding, this contributes to trust.

Through trust we can develop an even deeper understanding of what each others’ core motivators are — and from there, mutually beneficial outcomes can emerge.

Important: If you use the tools without the consciousness — in other words, if your intention is to get your way or manipulate a specific outcome — then nothing that comes out of your mouth will actually be NVC, even if it sounds like it!

NVC is primarily the consciousness and the intentionality that you bring to your interactions. The tools give you skillful means for fulfilling the intention — of connection and mutually beneficial outcomes — more consistently.

You can learn more about the basics of NVC here.

This book is a classic text for learning the concepts of Nonviolent Communication.

Because NVC consciousness and skills help to prevent misunderstandings and conflicts, build trust, develop mutual understanding, and co-create mutually agreeable solutions — NVC is especially important when conversations are emotionally and politically charged!

Needs and Strategies: Where the Conversation So Often Breaks Down

One of the core contributions of Nonviolent Communication is the distinction between universal human needs and the strategies we use to meet them. When this distinction is lost, conversations about homelessness collapse into judgment, polarization, and political stalemate.

Needs are universal, meaning that they apply to all people and never refer to a specific person taking any specific action.

Strategies, on the other hand, are the ways we go about meeting needs, and are therefore specific and contextual. For example, shelter is a universal human need — a 2-bedroom house on Main Street is a strategy.

People experiencing homelessness are often described — explicitly or implicitly — as the problem. They are labeled as dirty, lazy, dangerous, addicted, irresponsible, or beyond help. From an NVC perspective, these are not observations; they are evaluations, probably layered on top of fear, frustration, and a host of underlying values and needs.

This is another key differentiation NVC has to offer: observations (the neutral, objective facts) vs. evaluations, interpretations, and my story about what happened. When we can express clean observations the conversation is less likely to devolve into judgments, criticism, and name-calling.

Beneath the actions unhoused people take are the same universal needs we all share: housing, safety, dignity, autonomy, rest, health, belonging, and more.

The breakdown occurs when these needs are confused with particular strategies for meeting them. “They need to get a job.” “They need to go to treatment.” “They need to leave the encampment.” Each of these statements collapses a legitimate need into a single, imposed solution.

When that happens, disagreement hardens. Those who resist the strategy are seen as resistant to the need itself, and moralistic judgments (bad, wrong) follow.

This collapse doesn’t happen only on one side. Advocates, too, can conflate needs with strategies: “This [specific strategy] is the only way the needs can be met!” While specific strategies may be well-supported and deeply humane, treating any one of them as the answer rather than an answer can shut down dialogue with people whose needs include safety, predictability, or economic stability.

Once needs are framed as strategies, policy deadlock becomes inevitable. Conversations devolve into competing solutions rather than shared understanding.

Public discourse oscillates between criminalization and charity, enforcement and neglect, compassion and resentment — without ever addressing the deeper question:

What needs are we trying to meet, for whom, how, and at what cost — individually, community-wise, and systemically?

NVC invites us to slow this process down in order to create win-win, durable solutions. Instead of arguing for or against particular interventions, we begin by naming the universal needs of everyone involved and affected — clearly, concretely, and without moral overlay.

When housing is recognized as a need rather than a reward, and safety as a shared concern rather than a zero-sum conflict, new possibilities emerge — not easy ones, not quick ones, but those that combine humanity and long-term effectiveness.

This shift does not by itself solve homelessness. What it does is transform the process by restoring the conditions for honest and empathic conversation. And this becomes a powerful foundation for meaningful positive change.

Housing, safety, dignity, autonomy, belonging — when we collapse needs into strategies this tends to fuel moral judgment and policy deadlock.

Social Change Happens One Conversation at a Time — Including in Rooms of Power

Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, who developed NVC starting in the 1960s and 70s, had a dream that human beings could learn how to connect and understand each other — and that this could transform how we choose to live together on planet Earth.

He saw that social change constitutes any given number of conversations — but not just any kind of conversation.

His understanding of human psychology, embedded now in NVC, made it clear that if solutions were imposed and demanded rather than invited and co-created, they would be short-lived and breed resentment and separation.

So the kind of social change that creates buy-in, and invites people to own the solutions, consists of any given number of NVC conversations.

The policies that contribute to resolving, or to exacerbating, a tragic situation such as homelessness — these policies are drafted by individuals and discussed, and decided on, around conference tables or in Zoom calls.

Individuals bringing humanity and courage to the table can make a big difference. Give those individuals high-level NVC skills and they will be able to facilitate and negotiate mutually supported, durable solutions to the most intractable problems.

One of the skills we teach in our social change modules is how to create access to, and subsequently how to maximize a short meeting with, someone in a position of power.

If I have created an enemy image and am full of judgments about that person, the meeting is already lost before I even walk in the room.

If in my preparation time I can get empathy — from a colleague, for example — for all the feelings and needs underneath my judgments, that by itself can make a big difference. After a session like this I am likely to emerge more connected to my feelings, my needs, and any potential requests — and also with a lowered emotional charge.

If my colleague can help me do an NVC role play — an advanced technique taught by Dr. Rosenberg — I can make even more progress and be much better prepared for that meeting with a key decision-maker.

Policies don’t emerge from nowhere; they emerge from conversations shaped by fear, incentives, and unexamined narratives. The trust-building process of NVC, fueled by high-level empathy and honesty skills, can contribute to making a big difference in policy disagreements that seem intractable.

What NVC Is Powerful For — and What It Cannot Do Alone

Nonviolent Communication is not a magic wand, and it is not a substitute for policy, funding, or structural change. Treating NVC as a “silver bullet” can lead to saviorism — the belief that if we just say the right words suffering will dissolve — or to cynicism or hopelessness when reality inevitably reveals limitations.

NVC is powerful precisely because it is more modest than that.

NVC can be seen as a powerful practice of restoring human connection in places where it has broken down. In the context of homelessness, this matters enormously. When people are reduced to problems to be managed, cleaned up, or relocated, empathy erodes and violence — structural or otherwise — becomes easier to justify. NVC can shift that process by re-humanizing everyone involved, including people in positions of authority who are often operating from fear, pressure, and constraint.

What NVC does well is create conditions for movement. It helps people understand one another across ideological, economic, and experiential divides. It makes it possible to surface unmet needs that are otherwise hidden beneath anger, resignation, or moral certainty. It supports clearer requests, fewer assumptions, and conversations that do not immediately escalate into blame or shutdown.

This is not nothing — it is, in fact, a fundamental shift in process. And this can make the difference between stalemate and possibility.

At the same time, NVC cannot, by itself, house people. It cannot by itself correct distorted markets, dismantle profit incentives that depend on scarcity, or manufacture political will where none exists. No amount of empathic listening will make affordable housing suddenly lucrative, nor will compassionate dialogue alone overcome systems designed to prioritize short-term gain over long-term well-being.

Recognizing these limits is not a failure of NVC; it comes from a mature understanding that complex, intractable problems need to be addressed on multiple levels simultaneously.

When NVC is practiced without structural awareness, it risks becoming a soothing technique — useful for coping, but disconnected from power. When structural critique is practiced without NVC, it risks becoming dehumanizing in its own way — morally rigid, strategically myopic, and relationally ineffective.

The invitation is not to choose between empathy and analytical strategy, but to hold them both simultaneously. NVC gives us the relational capacity to stay in hard conversations long enough for real change to become possible. Structural awareness gives those conversations direction, leverage, and traction.

High-level NVC skills along with a nuanced understanding of systems, structures, power, and built-in incentives — used together — can help us avoid burnout and despair and keep us engaged where it matters most.

NVC may not be sufficient, but — from where I stand, witnessing years of ineffectiveness on this issue — it appears necessary.

The Structural Reality: Incentives, Profit, and Political Will

Homelessness persists not because humans lack intelligence, strategic thinking, care, compassion, or even proven solutions. Homelessness persists because the systems governing housing, land, and political decision-making are not designed to eliminate it.

In the United States, housing is treated primarily as a commodity, not as a public good or a guaranteed human need. Its value is tied to scarcity, speculation, and return on investment.

From this perspective, widespread housing insecurity is not a malfunction of the system; it is a predictable outcome. When shelter is profitable precisely because it is scarce, there is little structural incentive to make it universally available.

This reality shapes policy at every level. City planning departments experience competing pressures: residents demanding visible order and safety, developers seeking favorable conditions for investment, and service providers scrambling for limited funding. The result is a familiar pattern — short-term homelessness interventions that manage visibility rather than address root causes. Encampment evictions, temporary shelters, and piecemeal services may reduce political discomfort, but they rarely make a difference to homelessness itself.

Criminalization is one aspect of this incentive structure. When homelessness is framed as a public nuisance rather than a systemic failure, enforcement seems easier than investment. Police budgets grow. Social services remain underfunded. People are moved along rather than being housed. From an NVC lens, this reflects institutions attempting to meet needs for order, predictability, and public approval — often at the expense of the unmet needs of those with the least power.

Political timelines further reinforce this dynamic. Election cycles reward quick wins and visible action, not long-term prevention. Investments that would meaningfully reduce homelessness — deeply affordable housing, supportive services, structural reform — these types of changes can take years to show results. By then, the officials who championed them may no longer be in office. There is little political reward for solving a problem when success looks like the absence of something rather than a short-term enforcement spectacle.

Perhaps most telling is this: if there were reliable profit to be made in permanently eradicating homelessness, it would have happened already. Entire industries exist around managing homelessness — emergency services, enforcement, nonprofit funding cycles — while prevention remains comparatively invisible and under-resourced.

Naming these realities is not about assigning blame. It is about seeing something that is hard to see. Without structural literacy, even the most compassionate efforts risk being absorbed into systems that depend on the very suffering they claim to address.

Nonviolent Communication does not ask us to abandon empathy in the face of this truth. It asks us to bring empathy into contact with power, so that our conversations, advocacy, and actions are informed not only by care — but also by an honest understanding of how these systems and structures work.

From Empathy to Influence: Using NVC to Engage Systems

Systems and structures are strategies implemented by humans in order to satisfy certain needs. Humans can also change those strategies.

When strategies are implemented without deep knowledge of the needs of all the stakeholders, they usually end up meeting some needs at the expense of others.

In order to identify the deeper needs of all involved and affected stakeholders, a sincere and extremely well facilitated process of dialogue and deliberation needs to take place. Only after all the important needs have been identified does it make sense to begin to craft solutions.

If you jump to problem-solving before identifying all the needs, you risk a situation in which your solutions create more problems or lead to new conflicts — precisely because you cannot know that a strategy meets needs if you have not identified which needs you are trying to address.

NVC gives you the tools — not only to connect with family and neighbors about the things that are important to you.

NVC gives you the know-how and skills for addressing individuals and groups with power — local government, funders, neighborhood groups, civil society groups — and how to maximize the productive nature of all those conversations.

Without NVC, people who want to make a difference encounter two risks that are at opposite ends of the same spectrum — and both are equally ineffective. On one end of the spectrum you could collapse into politeness and compliance, being “nice” but refusing to rock the boat. On the other end of the spectrum is coming across as an abrasive jerk who is a bad listener and someone with whom no one wants to collaborate, negotiate, or co-create.

With NVC you begin to speak about what is important to you in ways that help people connect with you. When you encounter resistance you can switch to empathy and understand the other person’s needs behind that resistance.

By building rapport and trust you continue to make connections and elicit introductions that bring you closer to those who could really make a difference.

When — through NVC dialogues — you gain access to those people who have their hands on the levers of power, NVC skills help you make the most of those engagements. You can switch fluidly between the three areas: self-connection, empathy, and honesty. With in-the-moment self-connection you can keep your nervous system regulated, and speak clearly about what is important to you without alienating others. With empathy skills, you can help the other person feel understood even when you strongly disagree, knowing that the other person is more likely to hear you out if they feel heard first. And with NVC honesty, you can speak about what is important to you in a way that someone else could connect with even if they have a different worldview. From this place of high-level communication skills, you can make actionable requests — another NVC superpower — so that you can create movement and momentum.

What an NVC Practitioner Can Actually Do

For many people who care about homelessness, the gap between their concern and their potential impact can feel overwhelming. The mere scale and complexity of the problem leads well-intentioned people into either paralysis or overreach.

Nonviolent Communication offers a third path: strategic, relational action grounded in clarity about needs, power, and context.

One concrete contribution an NVC practitioner can make is convening conversations that would not otherwise happen. This might look like bringing together housed neighbors and outreach workers, business owners and service providers, or advocates and city staff. The role here is not to mediate a compromise or push a preferred solution, but to create conditions where people can speak honestly without being immediately dismissed or demonized. When needs that appear in conflict are named — safety, dignity, economic stability, belonging — new possibilities can emerge that were previously obscured by blame.

To be clear: needs themselves are never in conflict. It is the strategies that are in conflict. This is why it is so crucial to listen to the deeper needs before going to fixing or solving. Once people are connected and everyone’s needs are clear, the problem-solving process automatically becomes collaborative, and the solutions are much more accepted and durable.

Another powerful intervention is reframing dominant narratives. Much of the public conversation about homelessness is saturated with moralistic or evaluative language: deserving versus undeserving, responsible versus irresponsible, compassionate versus realistic. NVC practitioners are well-positioned to transform this framing by translating judgments into feelings and needs. We can dig deeper when we hear statements like “we can’t allow encampments here” — and see if we can identify the underlying needs, such as for safety and predictability. “People should be able to live here” can be translated as a need for dignity and shelter. This translation does not dilute how the stakes are expressed — it clarifies them.

As mentioned above, NVC can also be used to influence decision-makers, especially those who are rarely met with empathy. City council members, agency heads, and elected officials operate under intense pressure, scrutiny, and constraint. Approaching them solely with outrage or moral certainty often hardens defensiveness. Approaching them with empathy — without surrendering your truth — can create access where none existed. Clear, grounded requests that acknowledge competing pressures are more likely to be heard, even when they challenge the status quo.

Additionally, NVC is aligned with supporting coalition-building across real differences. Lasting change often requires unlikely alliances: advocates and residents, nonprofits and businesses, service providers and policymakers. These coalitions rarely form around shared ideology. They form around shared needs, discovered through sustained, skillful dialogue. NVC helps people stay in relationship long enough to find that common ground without erasing disagreement.

What NVC practitioners offer is not a solution to homelessness, but a capacity: the ability to hold complexity without collapse, to speak honestly without dehumanizing, and to remain engaged where others burn out or polarize. In a system that thrives on division and simplification, that capacity is not small — it can be catalytic.

Reflection: Questions That Can Deepen Clarity and Commitment

Nonviolent Communication begins not with changing others, but with seeing yourself more clearly. When it comes to homelessness, this self-inquiry matters. Strong opinions, righteous anger, helplessness, and despair often coexist even within the same person. Without reflection, these inner dynamics shape how you show up, what conversations you avoid, and where you place responsibility.

The questions below are not meant to produce quick answers. They are invitations to notice what is alive in you — and how that aliveness influences your engagement with this issue.

• When I think about homelessness, what judgments arise most quickly? Who are they directed toward — people experiencing homelessness, policymakers, neighbors, “the system,” or myself?
• What feelings come up underneath those judgments — fear, sadness, anger, guilt, exhaustion, grief? Which of these do I allow myself to feel, and which do I tend to block out or bypass?
• What needs of mine are touched by this issue? Safety? Justice? Meaning? Contribution? Integrity? Where do I experience frustration or other uncomfortable feelings because those needs are unmet?
• Where do I collapse needs into strategies — my own or others’? What solutions do I feel most attached to, and what might I fear would happen if they were not adopted?
• In what ways might I be avoiding power — telling myself that I am “just one person,” or that it’s someone else’s job to act?
• Conversely, where might I be over-identifying with responsibility, taking on more than is mine to carry, and risking burnout or resentment?
• Who do I find it hardest to extend empathy toward in this issue? What might that reveal about the edges of my compassion and the places where more empathy or self-empathy is needed?
• Finally, what form of engagement feels both honest and sustainable for me right now — not idealized, not performative, but real?

Having a certain degree of clarity does not mean that you need to have total certainty.

Having commitment to a cause does not mean you have to be a hero.

If you want to make a difference in this area, what I would wish for you is alignment — between your values and your actions, your level of care and your strategy choices, and between your deep empathy and a level of courage that feels like a growing edge.

You can take small steps, with steadiness and without the need to force anything.

Action: Small, Strategic Steps That Matter

Clarity and action go together. It’s as if clarity were the eyes and action were the legs and feet.

If you have clarity without action, you can look all you want, but there will be no movement. Clarity without action can become another form of avoidance.

If you take action without clarity, that would be like legs and feet taking you somewhere — but blindly, without seeing where you’re going or want to end up. Action without clarity can easily lead to burnout, resentment, or misdirected effort.

The invitation is not to do everything, but to harness your clarity and your action in order to take small, strategic steps that align with your capacity, values, and context.

Here are some starting places to consider:

• Start with one conversation you’ve been avoiding.
  This might be with a neighbor who has strong opinions, a community member who is frustrated, or a local official whose choices you disagree with. Bring curiosity, needs language, empathy, and humanity to a place where it is usually absent.
• Practice translation before persuasion.
  Start with empathic understanding. When you hear a judgment, reframe your understanding of it as an unmet need. This doesn’t mean agreeing — it means shifting the conversation from blame to meaning. Over time, slowing down and building trust creates room for nuance and possibility.
• Attend one public meeting — and listen empathically.
  City or county council sessions, neighborhood forums, and task force meetings are often emotionally charged and polarized. Rather than entering as an advocate or opponent, experiment with entering as a listener who can connect with needs on all sides. Reflecting needs out loud can lower the temperature and increase understanding in the room.
• Build or join a cross-perspective circle.
  If it is safe and feasible, convene or join a small group representing different roles — residents, service providers, business owners, faith leaders, advocates. The purpose is not consensus. The purpose is relationship, shared humanity, and information exchange.
• Support organizations already doing grounded, relational work.
  Not every contribution has to be direct engagement. Some people contribute through funding, logistics, volunteering, or network-building. Contribution can look like helping to sustain the people who sustain the work.
• Choose one NVC skill to deepen — intentionally.
  Empathic listening under stress. Self-empathy when triggered. Making clear, specific, present requests. Staying present with conflict without collapsing into fixing or withdrawing. Skill development is contribution — especially when shared. Capacity supports long-term effectiveness.
• Look at what has worked in other places.
  Even relational, non-blaming advocacy is limited without knowledge of effective strategies. Proven approaches include Housing First; permanent supportive housing; rapid rehousing with case management; prevention and diversion strategies; proactive outreach; expanding deeply affordable housing; and upstream policies that improve wages, health care access, child care, and reentry support. These reduce the pipeline into homelessness over time.
• Pace yourself.
  Unfortunately, homelessness is not a short-arc issue. Sustainable engagement matters more than dramatic bursts of effort. If this is your issue — get involved in a way that you can sustain. Self-care can be an act of service when it supports long-term contribution.

Small steps do not mean trivial steps. They mean right-sized actions rooted in courage, humility, persistence, and continuity — actions that expand your radius of care and impact while including your own needs in the process.

Choosing Courage Over Comfort

Engaging with homelessness is uncomfortable.

By giving you a language of universal human needs, Nonviolent Communication can highlight the areas and the ways in which your needs are unmet. While this may be unpleasant, it is far more effective than trying to be right, placing blame, and allowing things to continue as they are.

Courage is not the lack of fear. Courage exists precisely because there is fear.

Courage asks you to hold grief without numbing out, to stay in conversations that challenge your assumptions, to humanize people you might rather blame, and to see the systems we all participate in — not from a distance, but from the inside.

Courage rooted in NVC asks you to recognize that:

• empathy does not erase conflict,
• compassion does not guarantee agreement,
• and humanization does not automatically produce solutions.

And yet — it is precisely this willingness to remain relational in the face of complexity that keeps possibility alive.

Connection leads to conversations that lead to possibilities. Possibilities emerge from connection.

NVC does not promise that we will fix homelessness.

What NVC offers is a discipline around your willingness to:

• keep showing up,
• stay curious when judgment would be easier,
• honor your own limits while refusing to disengage from our shared humanity.

Courage, in this context, does not have to be dramatic or heroic.

It can look like choosing:

• dialogue over polarization,
• vulnerable honesty over politeness,
• compassion for humanity without collapsing into resignation.

NVC-rooted courage looks like practicing humanity in systems that slowly teach us to forget it.

Homelessness is both a structural crisis and a human one. Each conversation we approach with clarity, empathy, and courage becomes part of a larger arc of transformation — even when the results are not immediate or visible.

The work is imperfect, incomplete, and ongoing. And it matters.

Marshall Rosenberg on Changing the World and the Interconnectedness of Needs

Marshall Rosenberg taught me that the most powerful place to stand inside myself, if I want to create positive change, is an acknowledgment of both my agency and autonomy on the one hand, and my interrelatedness, interdependence, and interconnectedness with all of life — including humans — on the other.

The tension between autonomy and interdependence governs much of human action on this planet.

Yes, I have choice — and I could exercise my power without regard for how it impacts others’ needs. I am also interconnected and interdependent — but I do not need to lose my uniqueness or my agency, nor do I need to set myself on fire so that others can be warm.

NVC has given me skills to work in ways that turn detractors into supporters — one of the many NVC “superpowers” that develop with skill and experience.

As a proverb often described as African in origin says:

“If you want to go fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far, go together.”

But the interconnectedness of our needs is not merely theoretical.

Like language, needs exist both inside us and in a collective field.

As Marshall Rosenberg famously said:

“If one person in the world is going hungry, my needs for food and sustenance are not met.”

If this level of consciousness regarding our interdependence were achieved collectively, our politics, economics, urban planning, care for the environment, legal and justice systems — all of it would look very different!

At the end of a workshop with Marshall nearly 30 years ago, I remarked to him:

“NVC has the potential to really change the world!”

He replied:

“I’m increasingly becoming less afraid of that possibility!”

PuddleDancer Press Books on Nonviolent Communication and Positive Social Change

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