Charity Provides Mobile Shelters To Nation's Homeless

December 19, 2008 3:56 p.m. EST

Los Angeles, CA (AHN) - Saying that having women sleep on wet concrete under bridges with children is inexcusable in 2008, media executive and pro-social entrepreneur Peter Samuelson said every human being deserves a roof over their head.

Now, Samuelson is working to accomplish that by giving away portable mobile carts that convert to pop up tents to the homeless. Prior to this, Samuelson had founded three children's charities.

During an interview with CNN on Friday, Samuelson explained that he got the idea of helping to provide shelter to the homeless when he began noticing how many people were homeless as he rode his bike from his home Westwood, Los Angeles to the beach in Santa Monica.

Asked why he would care, Samuelson noted that in six days the world would celebrate the birth of a child whose parents were unable to find shelter in a building and were forced into a stable for animals. He pointed out the baby was put in the trough that animals normally ate out of and now 2,000 years later America has people who are sleeping in less desirable places than that.

Samuelson said his initial desire to help came when he counted 62 homeless men, women and children and began stopping to interview them and see how they lived. What he discovered was people sleeping in cardboard boxes and that outraged him.

"Well into the twenty-first century, if the best our advanced society can do for the hundreds of thousands of homeless human beings... men, women and children... who live among us is the cast-off box our refrigerator came in, what exactly does that say about us?" Samuelson says in a statement on the Web site of his organization.

He founded Everyone Deserves A Roof (EDAR) Inc., a 501(c)(3) charity, and sponsored a design contest at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design to come up with a low-cost portable shelter.

The winning design was a wheeled mobile single-person device that could be used during the day for recycling (a principal source of income for many who are homeless) and to carry belongings and would convert to a dry, safe, tent-like enclosure for sleeping at night, which was raised off the concrete, and had privacy and storage space.

EDAR units are four-wheeled devices that carry belongings during the day and unfold into framed tent-like enclosures with a bed at night. They are given away to homeless people. Right now EDAR is operating in California and uses contributions to fund manufacturing the units and giving them away at no charge to the homeless directly, or through its shelter partners.

The organization's mission statement posted on its Web site says the group respects permanent and temporary housing for the homeless in group settings which use buildings to provide shelter, but that EDAR addresses the needs of hundreds of thousands of homeless people living in American communities where no beds are available or people are unable or unwilling to participate in those solutions.

For more information, or to contribute, see the group's Website at EDAR.org.