Fighting Homelessness, One Smartphone at a Time

Holly Leonard has been homeless on and off for years. There was a stint in jail and, more recently, a period in a women’s homeless shelter, while her husband slept in their car. But in March, the two moved into a one-bedroom apartment in San Jose (CA), complete with a small garden. Leonard found it on Craigslist while using her Nexus 5 smartphone -- a donation from Google that she got from a San Jose nonprofit called Community Technology Alliance.

The smartphone giveaway program, though small, typifies the way Bay Area tech companies have started to respond to the glaring homelessness problem right outside their luxurious company campuses: not by donating clothes or serving food, but by using technology. In the United States, Internet access has in many ways become like a basic need. Without it, it can be difficult to find a home, apply for a job, sign up for classes, make homeless shelter reservations or find soup kitchens. And for people who live on the streets, smartphones are the most efficient way to connect to the Internet. So while clothing and food are vital, advocates say equipping homeless and low-income people with phones and technical skills also makes sense. To distribute the Google phones, Community Technology Alliance works with other nonprofits to find people who would benefit from them and use them responsibly. It has given away only about 100 of the 1,000 phones so far, and promised another 350 to various organizations. BetterWorld Wireless provides data and phone service for $30 to $40 a month. St. Anthony’s, a San Francisco nonprofit, said more than 40 percent of people living on the city’s streets already had cellphones. Many are Lifeline phones , part of a federal program that gives low-income people free phones for calling and texting, but not for Internet access.