Weird-But-True: Donations Help Shelter Continue To Hurt People

I see one of the organizations in my town is having a fund-raiser and giving part of its cash to the homeless shelter.
I am pleased that my community gives evidence that it cares about the homeless in our area. A healthy community reaches out to its own.
Any thinking person who wants to help the homeless in their community would conclude that donating to the homeless shelter would be a logical step.
There are a couple of things wrong here, however. First, this particular shelter has such a bizarre and destructive approach to people that it is worse than having no shelter at all. We would be better off as a community to halt any further support until the innate dignity and worth of the individuals seeking assistance there is restored, and people are no longer dismissed by the whims of the director, or discounted as valuable people, or told to their faces that they are mentally ill.
Of nearly every male in the shelter, while I was there, the director would remark, “There goes a sad, sick little man.”
Also wrong in this scenario is that the shelter is the stopping place for thinking about the homeless.
Because of the shelter’s poor and erratic treatment of people, the community is flooded with individuals who are making do in motels, a friend’s couch, or settling for meager shelter sometimes in rooms no bigger than a bed. These people are not being cared for, and any monies given to the shelter will not reach the under-sheltered and the under-assisted who are trying to kick-start a life here.
Our worse-than-nothing homeless shelter is not the only way to reach out with donations. In fact, giving money to this shelter is ultimately like giving away free packs of cigarettes in the name of cancer research.
Some of these people eat at the Lunch Together soup kitchen program in the basement of one of our downtown churches. Some of these people are a month’s rent, or less, away from acquiring a decent apartment. Some of these people are short the few dollars to get an ID card, or to get a certified copy of their birth certificate, or to restore a driver’s license.
Why not work with a property manager to provide a needy person or couple or family with the first month’s rent and/or deposit required to get into a place. This alone stops many from going any further in their quest for a place to live. Why not give money to Lunch Together, which does not have a multimillion-dollar budget, the bulk of which is made up of grants.
My community needs to realize that the homeless shelter in this town does not help the homeless. Although it truly feels good to give money to such a cause, in reality, donations help the shelter continue to hurt people.