How Much Is a Human Being Worth?

Inside the world of social welfare: funding calls, inadequate services, overcrowded shelters, and people at risk of becoming nothing more than numbers.

One Saturday in January, a young man came to us, soaked through by the rain. He wasn't asking for money. He was asking for a meal and a change of clothes.

We'll call him Giggi, to protect his identity. He had arrived in Italy eleven years earlier. He had held a valid residence permit for years, had a job, and, at least on paper, was someone who should have had every opportunity to build a dignified life.

Yet that Saturday, he was standing in front of us, drenched from head to toe, after months spent moving between shelters and the streets.

His story, like so many others we encounter every day, forced us to ask a simple question: How can someone end up living on the streets after spending years inside a system that was supposed to support them?

Every day, through our outreach work, our street services, and our support desks, we meet people of different nationalities, ages, and backgrounds. And yet, more often than not, the story is remarkably similar.

They tell us they have become numbers.

Numbers in a project. Numbers attached to funding. Numbers on a waiting list. Numbers in a statistic.

And no longer people.

Some have been waiting for years to access social or employment support. Some spend months sleeping on the streets because shelters are full. Others are excluded from food assistance because their ISEE is considered too high, even though they still cannot make it to the end of the month.

This is what we call the grey zone: people who are not considered poor enough to qualify for assistance, yet do not have enough resources to live with dignity.

And so soup kitchens become the new normal.

A service designed for emergencies becomes part of everyday life for people who work, people who receive a pension, and people who have simply suffered an unexpected setback and suddenly found themselves unable to keep up with their expenses.

Sometimes, it takes very little to fall.

And once you do, getting back on your feet can feel almost impossible.

We live in an increasingly divided society. On one side are those who can afford to spend substantial amounts every month on loans, credit, and instalments. On the other are those who, with the same amount of money, have to choose between paying the rent, putting food on the table, or having somewhere safe to sleep.

And in between lies a growing group of people who do not fully belong to either side.

A group that is increasingly at risk of becoming invisible.

Meanwhile, associations and non-profit organizations often find themselves competing for resources instead of genuinely working together.

Everyone protects their own patch.

Sometimes out of necessity. Sometimes because they are afraid of losing funding. And sometimes because the system itself encourages competition rather than cooperation.

This is where one of our greatest concerns begins: the race for funding.

The Race for Funding

The system is supposed to put people first.

But what happens when the project becomes more important than the person it was created to help?

We increasingly see organizations spending months designing projects in order to secure funding, only to spend much of the following year keeping those projects alive, reporting on them, and applying for funding all over again.

Year after year.

Project after project.

Funding round after funding round.

And essential activities — distributing meals, running soup kitchens, providing someone with a place to be heard, going out onto the streets to meet people where they are — risk becoming little more than services to be counted.

One meal becomes a number.

One intervention becomes a number.

One person becomes a number.

And we have to ask ourselves: When did we start measuring the value of a human being by the cost of the service provided to them?

Every day we see advertisements, social media posts, and public statements celebrating how much the non-profit sector and public authorities are investing in improving services and creating social impact.

But the people living through these situations often tell a very different story.

We are not saying that the entire non-profit sector operates this way.

That would be unfair, and it simply would not be true.

We know people and organizations that work every day with dedication, sacrifice, and very limited resources.

Our concern begins when the non-profit sector stops being a tool at the service of people and risks becoming part of the very system it is supposed to help change.

That is the moment when the project can become more important than the human being.

When the System Loses Sight of the Person

Let's go back to Giggi.

We opened a case file and began by taking immediate action, then working backwards through his history, trying to piece together what had happened and reconnect the different parts of his story.

What we discovered left us speechless.

The organizations responsible for supporting him had not been in contact with him for around two years. The last member of staff assigned to his case did not even know what type of residence permit he held.

Two years without contact.

Two years in which a person's entire life can change.

Two years in which someone can lose their job, their home, their documents, their health, their relationships.

Two years in which someone can end up on the streets.

From that moment on, our relationship with Giggi became something more than assistance.

It became a human relationship.

A relationship built on trust.

Today, Giggi is no longer living on the streets. He is fighting against labour exploitation and against a welfare system that, in our experience, too often risks creating dependency instead of helping people regain their independence.

And yet he continues to fight with dignity.

That is what matters to us.

We do not want people to remain dependent on assistance forever.

We want people to be given the means to reach a point where they no longer need assistance at all.

When Emergency Becomes the Norm

The problem becomes even clearer when we look at accommodation and shelter services.

We see shelters that are full while people remain outside.

We see facilities that exist on paper but fail to meet people's actual needs.

We see people forced to live in conditions that should never be considered acceptable.

Families dealing with infestations.

Showers that cannot be used.

Basic services that become difficult, sometimes almost impossible, to access.

And sometimes even something as basic as a shower is turned into a system of tickets and vouchers, through which people receive nothing more than water — sometimes without even soap.

From the outside, these situations may look like isolated incidents.

For those of us working on the ground, they become an everyday reality.

And perhaps the most frustrating part is watching people become accustomed to it.

They become accustomed to waiting.

They become accustomed to closed doors.

They become accustomed to hearing, “There is no room.”

They become accustomed to being told, “Come back tomorrow.”

They become accustomed to being passed from one office to another.

Until eventually, they begin to believe that this is normal.

When No One Answers

We met an asylum-seeking family with three children, including a one-year-old girl, who had been left sleeping on the streets for more than a month.

A month.

A family with children.

On the streets.

We were forced to take legal action against the authorities responsible.

And the very next day, almost as if by magic, a place in a shelter became available.

At that point, the question becomes unavoidable:

Did that place really not exist, or had no one decided to make it available before?

These are difficult questions.

But they are questions we must have the courage to ask.

Because we cannot accept a system in which access to a safe place depends on someone's ability to keep insisting, know the right person, find an organization willing to accompany them, or take legal action.

We cannot accept that someone should have to prove just how desperate they are before anyone is willing to listen.

Who Decides Who Deserves Help?

Is it right to have a system that decides who is allowed a place in a shelter?

Is it right for someone to be considered too “well-off” to receive a meal simply because their ISEE exceeds a certain threshold, when in reality they still cannot make it to the end of the month?

Is it right for a family to remain on the streets while publicly funded accommodation exists to house them?

Is it right for someone who crosses a country in search of a better future to be treated first as a problem and only afterwards as a human being?

And above all:

Who are we to decide the value of another person's life?

These are some of the questions that follow us into our support desks, our homes, our streets, and our thoughts every day.

We do not have all the answers.

But we have learned that we cannot stop asking the questions.

Disobedience as a Human Choice

For us, there is one fundamental principle.

We call it social and civil disobedience.

It does not mean creating conflict for the sake of conflict. It does not mean abandoning responsibility.

It means choosing, whenever a situation demands it, to put the human being before the system.

It means intervening, by whatever means necessary, at whatever time and in whatever situation, when a person needs to be saved, protected, or defended.

It means refusing to stand by in the face of injustice simply because an office does not respond, a procedure says otherwise, a service is full, or a regulation tells someone to wait.

For us, when a person's life, dignity, or safety is at stake, the human being comes first.

Before the State.

Before the government.

Before bureaucracy.

Before the project.

Before the funding call.

Before the funding itself.

This is one of our fundamental values.

Because we believe that following rules cannot mean becoming indifferent to suffering.

And we believe that a truly civil society is not the one with the most procedures, the most forms, or the most services on paper.

It is the one that, when confronted with a person asking for help, is still able to see a person.

We Don't Want People Dependent on Assistance. We Want People to Be Free.

In a world where more and more families risk finding themselves without a home, without a job that allows them to live with dignity, or without anyone willing to genuinely listen to them, we must have the courage to question what we have come to accept as normal.

We cannot build a system in which emergency becomes permanent.

We cannot turn soup kitchens into a routine response to poverty.

We cannot accept social housing becoming the final destination of support pathways that fail to restore independence.

We cannot believe that simply opening a support desk is enough if there is no human being behind that desk willing to listen.

And we cannot allow a person to become the means through which someone obtains funding, a project, a job, or a career.

Every person has the right to live with dignity.

Whether they are at the beginning of their life or at the end.

Whether they have a job or have lost it.

Whether they are Italian or foreign.

Whether they have a home or are searching for one.

Whether they need a meal today or a support pathway lasting months.

Dignity cannot depend on a funding call.

It cannot depend on a waiting list.

It cannot depend on a number.

And above all, it cannot depend on how much that person is worth economically to the system.

Because in the end, the question we started with remains the same:

How much is a human being worth?

For us, the answer is simple.

They are priceless.

Matteo Grossi
Founder & President, Safe House
Working every day to put people before the system.