Offering ‘Hope for Homeless’ is FHS competing trio
Tathineni, chosen earlier this year as a Town of Farragut committee youth representative, joins fellow seniors Ananya Suresh and Kinley Nuyen — all three part of DECA, FHS’s business club — to compete against other school teams across the state in Community Awareness, where they choose an issue.
“We have to write a paper about our efforts and present it at the state competition in February,” Tathineni said.
“We are trying to work toward helping the issue or raise awareness of the issue,” she added. “Since all three of us have lived in Farragut basically our entire lives, we’ve kind of seen how the homeless population has grown a lot and have done our research on it.
“We chose the issue of the rising homeless population and are working toward helping them with our organization Hope for the Homeless.”
As for the homelessness trend, “It’s been like 50 percent increases in this area, so we decided to (confront) that problem that’s so prevalent in Knoxville,” Tathineni said.
“We started our organization, Hope for the Homeless. With that, we’re trying to raise awareness of what homelessness can look like, where it first increased a lot, the root causes of homelessness,”
Concerning false impressions, “There’s a lot of stigma about it,” Tathineni said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, they’re homeless because they are doing drugs or because of alcohol,’ but when we did our research, there’s a lot more to it, like housing and family issues and increase of prices of stuff today.”
Pointing out “harmful policies that are made regarding the homeless,” Tathineni said one such example is a state law passed earlier this year “where it is now illegal to camp out or sleep on public or private property, and it could lead to a $3,000 fine or up to six years in jail.
“Especially with the rising homeless population, that just means more incarceration rates, people who don’t have the money are being fined and the homeless are being criminalized,” she added.
“Some ways people can take action are writing letters to local officials to express their discontent with this issue, and we’re actually going to do a session in the spring semester about that with students at Farragut High School by partnering with JSA, our politics and debate club.”
The students also are striving to help the homeless financially and partnering with organizations, such as Fig Tree, a community shelter through Cokesbury United Methodist Church in West Knoxville.
While people cannot stay there overnight, Tathineni said “they can come during the day and get their laundry done; they can use computers to look for a job and other uses; and it provides food.
“We (had) a group of eight volunteers go there (Saturday, Dec. 9), and we’re going to do another volunteer group in the spring,” she added.
“We have a GoFundMe at https://gofund.me/8add2308 that we are asking the community to donate to. All the money we raise is going to Fig Tree to get the resources they need.”
Donation drive-wise, they are looking for “Hot Hands, deodorant, laundry pods, small blankets, dryer sheets and other small items,” she said.
