Welcome to After Hello! Thank you for stopping by.
Mission
Our mission is 1) to nuance public awareness about homelessness by sharing unique, case-by-case stories, and 2) to build empathy in today’s high school and college students by training them to serve disadvantaged people and communicate those stories.
1) We believe that people who are experiencing the condition of homelessness each have a singular story to tell. The more stories we know, the more nuanced our perception of homelessness, and the better we can address each person’s needs with grace and versatility. Also, increased public awareness encourages policymakers to treat this issue with urgency. Street Humans is our project for investigating these stories and our platform for sharing them.
2) We give students safe, well-structured opportunities to reach out to and have conversations with people experiencing homelessness in our communities, going beyond physical acts of serving to forge emotional connections. In this way, students learn to relate to people who are different from themselves—a lifelong and necessary skill—and learn to consider themselves in the context of a range of socioeconomic statuses, developing a broader worldview. At the same time, they bring human comfort to their correspondents by giving the gifts of time and a listening ear.
Background
After Hello was founded in the summer of 2017 as an expansion of Austin Street Humans (ASH). Founded by Isabella Zou in the summer of 2016, ASH grew out of her volunteer work with people experiencing homelessness, and her subsequent desire to investigate the causes of homelessness. ASH began as a place to personally document her conversations and discoveries, then quickly transformed into a project intending to broaden the public’s understanding of homelessness by sharing the unique, complex stories of people experiencing it. After Hello was born out of Isabella’s desire to offer other youth the opportunity to learn some of the lessons in empathy, perspective, and humility that she had learned through her own work. ASH became a joint effort under the direction of After Hello as more and more staff writers were trained to build relationships with people and report their stories. In addition to building up ASH, After Hello runs events facilitating conversations, sock and note-writing drives.