Previously we had been talking about targeting the public and convincing them to donate things like blankets and clothes so we started by talking about ways inwhich we could continue to target the public.
One idea that came across quite stongly was to target retired professionals and convince them to get to homeless shelters and help teach homeless people or aid in any way they could.
We had some evidence to support that this would be needed because St. George's Crypt told us that any help was welcome.
The only problems that came about were that we didn't know how willing retired people would be to effectively take up another job but without pay. Other issues that came up were to do with the age of the retired professionals and how much they would be able to help.
One thing that I have noticed looking back is that 'retired professionals' covers a lot of professions and ages and both genders which is not very narrow at all.
After a while of being unsure about everything and the project not going very far, we looked again at the research that we had and decided to change the focus of the brief to be about addressing the homeless people dierectly.
When we first decided this there were a lot of worries and things to think about. It was clear from our research that a large percentage of homeless people have issues and circumstances that would mean we had to think really hard about how we addressed them (for example alcohol/ drug addiction, mental health issues or physical dissability).
So we knew that we wanted to target homeless people directly with our resolution and we knew that we had to take a lot of care in the laguage that we used to make sure we communicated properly.
Next we decided to focus on one area to address. A lot of our research focussed around health and safety and deaths among homeless people so we dcided to choose this as a focus.
To start this new focus we researched homeless specific health care in Leeds and we found some places quite quickly. It was at this point that we decided to help homeless people by producing a resolution that directed them to the nearest homeless health care.
We didn't want to create a generic kind of poster because we decided that it wouldn't stand out or be of any use. After all, the poster would have to deal with the same kind of conditions as the homeless person (rain, wind, ice etc) and the poster could easily not withstand it and may not last long at all.
To beat all these issues we decided to make a stencil which could be used to spray paint our directions on to walls.
The spray paint could withstand all weather conditions and woul stand out from something like a poster.
After choosing this idea, we got straight in to making the resolution. Everyone worked together to make sure it was kept as simple as possible and was clear and eyecatching.
After creating the stencil we looked into our research to find the best places to put the stencil. Luckily someone had found some statistics on where homeless people are more likely to sleep on the street. We couldn't actually spray the stencil around because we would all have been arrested so I did some rough photoshop mock-ups of some of the places that the directions could be sprayed.
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