Phone for the Homeless

My good friend Aaron sent me this story about Google giving free permanent phone numbers to homeless people in San Francisco. They operate like standard voicemail boxes, accessible from any phone, and will allow these people to include their callback numbers on job applications and the like. If it works in San Francisco Google plans to scale it to other major cities.

Great idea.

I was thinking about how to capitalize on this. Why not offer these newly-phone-numbered folks the chance to sign up for a call list. Or several lists. Then aggregate the most applicable job openings and send them out via voicemail to each person. It's practically no marginal cost once the infrastructure is developed. You can do this with health information, housing opportunities, etc.

One thing I learned while traversing skid row in Los Angeles is that, more than money, hope is often the greatest need among homeless people. What better way to start rebuilding hope than by presenting opportunities directly to people over and over again.

It's a new era in addressing homelessness, because never have homeless people been so easily addressable.

Any other ideas?