by Andrew Shapter (Huffington Post)

Posing with Santa Claus at Christmas is one of those great American traditions that we hold dear. Each year, every kid, smiling or crying, from one to 92 lines up in malls and shopping centers across the country to have their photo snapped with the jolliest, most famous, red-suited, white-bearded philanthropist on the planet. It's a magical time when kids are encouraged to dream as big as they can, and for families to have a keepsake that they can cherish for generations to come. But when all of the photos have been taken, and all of the wish lists have been heard and guaranteed on a "naughty or nice" basis, most families go back to their homes for a long winter's nap, and most "Santas" pack up the suit, take off the beard, and call it a day until next December. But for one Santa in Austin, Texas, every day is Christmas.

His real name is Alan Graham, and for the past 11 years, as co-founder of Mobile Loaves and Fishes he has taken his role to heart. Today, armed with a fleet of 13 trucks, an uncanny resemblance to St. Nick and an unconditional love for his fellow man, Graham is one of the toughest soldiers leading the fight to end homelessness in America, and his mission to serve this country's less fortunate is as unwavering as his dedication to a higher calling. Catching up with Alan and his team of volunteers on the eve of a holiday season that will see a significant increase in the number of homeless families in need of food and shelter, I asked him to share his thoughts on the concept of Christmas 365 days a year and how we as Americans can change the state of homelessness in this country by not only facing our fears, but by changing our attitudes about the homeless.

How many times have you been Santa Claus for the holidays? 

Funny you should ask. I actually began playing Santa when I was 15 years old back in Alvin, Texas. I was hired to play Santa at an old Gibson's department store. The next year they actually flew me in on a helicopter. I gained a reputation and started to play Santa for some of the mentally challenged folks who lived in my town.

What did you do before Mobile Loaves & Fishes?

 I was in the real estate development business. Particularly towards the end of this part of my life I was focused on developing air cargo facilities on airports around the U.S.  When did Mobile Loaves & Fishes get its start? The idea germinated in the Spring/Summer of 1998. My wife Tricia and I were having coffee with a friend of ours who was telling us about a ministry in Corpus Christi where multiple churches would come together on cold winter nights to distribute resources to the brothers and sisters who lived on the streets. It was at this moment that the idea of a catering truck as a distribution vehicle entered my conscious mind. <em>What did it take to get started? Acting on the idea. That simple really. Once I began to share the idea with others the concept just took off.  

Do you remember your first day?

First, we had to prove that this was something we could do. So on October 13th, 1998 six of us loaded up 75 sack meals into the back of my buddy's green mini-van and hit the streets of Austin. Our first stop we ran into a homeless couple who lost their friend the night before to an accident. They were awash in grieving and there we were at this most appropriate time in their lives and ours. We have never looked back since.

Do you have any prior experience dealing with the homeless? Does it require training?

 None really. Unless you recall the time in about 1981 when my then girlfriend, now wife, Tricia was accosted and panhandled by a homeless man in downtown Austin as being experience. I was incensed and berated this poor fellow telling him to get a job and lift himself out of his pathetic situation. I thought I was being righteous but realized later I was being an ass. No training required. It is on-the-job training. Just care about other people. 

What are some of the biggest misconceptions about the homeless?

I would say that the biggest misconception is that they are lazy, drug addicts and choose to be this way. Nothing can be further from the truth. I tell people that in all the years I have been doing this I have never and I mean NEVER come across anyone who chooses homelessness as a lifestyle choice. Accepting, yes. Choice, no. In terms of being lazy I can tell you that it is quite the opposite. Having spent many, many nights on the streets I have found that the homeless are quite resilient and resourceful and the opposite of lazy. I often half seriously joke that if Armageddon hits we all need to leave the comforts of home and find the homeless population; you will survive there. Drug addicts? This particular segment of our population is infected with this disease too. The U.S. Conference of Mayors study on homelessness found that 25 percent of the homeless population battles issues of addictions. That also means that 75 percent don't battle this disease.

People have told me that they are often conflicted about what they should do when they encounter a homeless person. There is often suspicion about what the homeless person is really up to. Some question if the homeless person is being honest about what they really need. How do you know when to help and when not to?

Just saw a three panel cartoon the other day. Homeless person holding a sign that says "Being honest and I just need a drink". Next panel shows a fellow handing over some money and saying that they appreciate the honesty then in the third panel the homeless person is at the local fast food joint getting a bite to eat with the recently "dishonestly" acquired funds. We send out mixed signals and like Madison Avenue they play to that. Kind of like GM implying that if we buy that new red Corvette that the blonde babe will come along too. Say that your generosity is between you and your God. We pray that our generosity will be used for positive purposes but we really can never control that. And frankly the person may have a wife and child just out of our sight and they need formula and diapers but if I only focus on the negative -- that they will buy drugs, alcohol or tobacco -- then I miss the opportunity to help really fill the need. I say, let them carry the burden of how they use our generosity. I don't want to be oppressed by the fear of being "scammed" out of my dollar. Help when your heart says to help and leave it at that. 

Most of the homeless population in the U.S. are concentrated in urban areas, so if you could address all the city mayors at once, what would you tell them?

If you want to understand homelessness you MUST first understand what H-O-M-E is! In the ground breaking book "Beyond Homeless" the authors talk about the phenomenology of home and that there are eight characteristics of home. Home is a place of permanence. Home is a dwelling place. Home is a storied place. Home is a place of hospitality. Home is a safe resting place. Home is a place of orientation. Home is a place of embodied inhabitation. And Home is a place of affiliation and belonging. Our political leaders do not have a clue what HOME really is, and so will never be able to address the real causes of homelessness. They must come to grips with this. Go to MLFNOW to learn more about what HOME means.

How has your experience working with Mobile Loaves & Fishes changed you?

Profoundly! Really hard to articulate this but the past 11 years have been transforming in many ways. 

Your story appears in my new documentary called Happiness Is, so does serving the homeless actually make you happy?

 I often say that if there were a Fortune 500 for the happiest people on the planet I would have to be in consideration for the top spot. Happy? More than I have ever been. Serving PERIOD makes you happy. Serving is the happy drug. Take some and get hooked! 

If someone wants to help the homeless but they are not sure what to do or where to go, what advice do you have for them?

Begin big by rolling down your tinted windows and saying hello. Start there and repeat as often as possible and then see where that leads. It is that simple yet profound. yet profound.

Watch him in action...

Happiness is a sappy word and a flimsy concept — more fleeting than contentment, several octaves lower than joy. But happiness is what pollsters test and economists track, however clumsily, so we're stuck with it as the medium for measuring our mood. Not surprisingly, that mood has bounced around over the years, with the general sense of well-being hitting its lowest points in 1973, 1982, 1992 and 2001, all recession years. So why is it that at least some aspects of the Great Recession of 2009 appear to have made people feel better? (See 10 big recession surprises.)

In January 2008, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index was launched. It was designed to work like a Dow Jones average of attitude. At least 1,000 people are surveyed daily, 350 days a year. (You can see how happy people are broken down by congressional district; Utah turns out to be the merriest state, West Virginia the glummest.) When the markets tanked last fall, happiness did too, and anyone who has lost his or her job, house or health care is probably still in a world of pain. But here's the funny thing: by this past summer, overall well-being was higher than it was in the summer of 2008, before the Apocalypse. In fact, the latest report finds America's cheeriness at an all-time high. An August report from the Pepsi Optimism Project (POP) positively fizzed: Americans are more optimistic now than a year ago about their well-being (88% vs. 84%); health, finances, relationships and odds of finding love (70% vs. 61%). Don't trust soda-company polls? Consumer Reports confirms that we don't plan to spend much money this Christmas, but the vast majority of us — 87% — expect this holiday season will be as happy as or even happier than last year's. Meanwhile, the Secret Society of Happy People (which "encourages the expression of happiness and discourages parade-raining") reports traffic to its not-so-secret website has increased since the downturn. (See 20 ways to get and stay happy.)

Everyone — or at least everyone who claims to be happy — has some reason for finding the upside to the downturn. Mine has to do with the end of Expectation Inflation, a phenomenon that can be as corrosive to our spirits as price inflation is to our savings. Expectations are a mash-up of hope and conceit, what you've earned and what you imagine luck might hand you as a bonus for just showing up. So what did it mean that over the past generation our expectations grew so big so fast that we had effectively supersized the American Dream?

Some parts of raised expectations are plainly good. We expect to live well into our 80s because medicine keeps getting better. Many more high school students expect to go to college. In 1973, 47% of recent high school graduates attended college; last year 69% of new graduates enrolled. We expect our gadgets to get smaller and smarter, cooler and cheaper, because technology evolves exponentially, and at light speed. (See how to plan for retirement at any age.)

But the Great Recession has also exposed our magical thinking about what constitutes a middle-class lifestyle. Flash back a generation to the house with the white picket fence. It had a black-and-white TV with an antenna, a car in the garage, a chicken in every pot and two kinds of lettuce (light green and dark green). Now the average house is more than 50% bigger, the car is twice as powerful (and there's often more than one), the TV is flat and gets 900 channels, and we expect the grocery store to have strawberries year-round and about 50 flavors of mustard. Small wonder we started charging our life-insurance premiums on our credit cards; we only expected to pay when we died.

So while optimism is the all-American anesthetic, at some point Expectation Inflation was bound to take its toll. I'm struck by how many people tell pollsters that the voluntary downshifting and downsizing of the past year have come as a kind of relief. Maybe we've lowered our standards. But we already knew that money can buy only comfort, not contentment; happiness correlates much more closely with our causes and connections than with our net worth. Americans may have less money — charitable giving in current dollars dropped for the first time in 20 years in 2008 — but about a million more people volunteered their time to a cause. Which makes me wonder: Is it a coincidence that eight of the 10 happiest states in the country also rank in the top 10 for volunteering?

Whatever you make of the psychology of happiness, we know something of its physics. It rises as it ricochets off other people, returning to us stronger by virtue of being released. It gets bigger when we don't care if it gets smaller; we stopped buying all the stuff we didn't need that was supposed to make us happier, and we seem to be happier for it. And who would have expected that?

NEW YORK, Oct. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Coinciding with the official opening of the
first Happy Science temple in New York City, prolific author and 'living
Buddha' Master Ryuho Okawa has penned The Science of Happiness: 10 Principles
for Manifesting Your Divine Nature (Destiny Books, an imprint of Inner
Traditions, October, 2009 - http://www.innertraditions.com/ryuhookawablog).


The Science of Happiness offers readers the 10 principles Okawa says can serve
as their compass for a spiritual life. These are Happiness, Love, Mind,
Enlightenment, Progress, Wisdom, Utopia, Salvation, Reflection and Prayer.
Okawa shows how following these principles can bring happiness and spiritual
growth not only to ourselves but to all those around us. He provides the tools
necessary to transform one's inner world to be receptive to true happiness and
enlightenment--and to find one's true purpose in life.


Okawa's Happy Science has also recently opened its newest temple at 79
Franklin St. in TriBeCa. Yuki Oikawa, CEO of the Happy Science Movement in the
US and primary US spokesperson for Okawa, says that at a time when the city's
happiness seems to be at an all-time low, the temple's programs are designed
to help New Yorkers discover the 10 principles and how to apply them in order
to have more joy in their lives. "My parents named me Yuki, meaning Happiness,
and that is what I am here now to bring to New Yorkers," he says.


For more information about The Science of Happiness and to request a copy or
schedule an interview with Yuki Oikawa, please contact Judy Katz, Katz
Creative, at 212-580-8833 or Judy@KatzCreative.com.


About The Science of Happiness


The Science of Happiness presents Master Ryuho Okawa's 10 essential principles
that can serve as a compass for a spiritual life: Happiness, Love, Mind,
Enlightenment, Progress, Wisdom, Utopia, Salvation, Reflection, and Prayer.
Okawa shows how following these principles can bring happiness and spiritual
growth not only to ourselves, but to all those around us. He provides the
tools necessary to transform one's inner world to be more receptive to true
happiness and enlightenment--and in the process find one's true purpose in
life. He also reveals other extraordinary spiritual truths, such as the
secrets of the ancient continents of Mu and Atlantis and the structure of the
spirit world.




SOURCE  Inner Traditions Publishing Group

Judy Katz, +1-212-580-8833, judy@katzcreative.com

Until November, Lisa Traina had a classic New York glamour job: organizing private parties in the Art Deco opulence of the Rainbow Room. Now she spends 10-hour shifts walking down gritty sidewalks trying to persuade homeless people to go to the Bowery Mission for food and shelter.

“I worked at the top of the world,” she said. “And the next day you’re working down on Broadway and saying to somebody, ‘Let me show you where you can get a bowl of soup for the night.’ ”

After being laid off, Ms. Traina, 50, enlisted in the growing army of the newly unemployed that have been marching into the offices of nonprofit organizations since the recession hit, looking to do some good, maybe network a little or simply fill the hours they used to be at the office.

They have searched for tasks on volunteernyc.org — which last month had 30 percent more visitors than in February 2008 — and forced New York Cares, an umbrella organization, to add extra new-volunteer orientations at a Whole Foods Market downtown that quickly booked solid an unheard-of three weeks in advance. In Philadelphia, Big Brothers Big Sisters has seen a 25 percent increase in inquiries from potential mentors over this time last year. And theTaproot Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that places skilled professionals in volunteer positions, had more people sign up on one day earlier this year than in an entire month a year ago.

Many who run nonprofits have marveled at the sudden flood of bankers, advertising copywriters, marketing managers, accountants and other professionals eager to lend their formidable but dormant skills. The Financial Clinic, which counsels the working poor on economic matters, recently dispatched an M.I.T.-educated ex-Wall Street type to help people in Chinatown prepare their tax returns.

“One person’s trash is another person’s treasure,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, a marketing manager for the nonprofit organization Learning Leaders.

But others grumbled that the current love affair with volunteerism, encouraged by President Obama’s nationwide call to public service, can be a mixed blessing. Smaller organizations, with staffs of fewer than 20 and no full-time volunteer coordinator, have struggled to absorb the influx, especially since many of them have simultaneously had to cut back on projects in the face of dwindling donations and government grants.

“Can you make them stop calling?” groused one nonprofit executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Everybody’s inspired by Obama,” he said, adding: “They also don’t have jobs.”

Lindsay Firestone, who manages pro bono projects for Taproot, said the organization had scaled back recruitment this year after attracting more volunteers than it could possibly accommodate. “It’s like a Greek tragedy,” she said. “We’re thrilled to have all of these volunteers. But now organizations are stuck not being able to take advantage of it because they don’t have adequate funding.”

Bertina Ceccarelli, a senior vice president at the United Way in New York — which partners with the mayor’s office to run the volunteernyc.org matching service — said the outpouring was similar to that after 9/11 — except that the new volunteers have more time to fill.

“It’s sad but true,” Ms. Ceccarelli said, “but the irony is that sometimes it’s almost more work to find something for a volunteer to do than to just turn them away.”

None of that has dimmed the volunteers’ enthusiasm.

Continuum Hospice Care, which assists New Yorkers at the end of their lives, has started a waiting list this year for volunteers. Allison Maughn, the interim president, said many of them were hoping that their unpaid work would eventually turn into a paid job, and have been raising their hands for the most menial tasks, like stuffing envelopes and data entry. “They’re even happy to sit at the reception desk and answer the phones,” she said in amazement.

New York Cares had double the number of volunteers this February as last, and a survey the group conducted showed that a third of them were unemployed. At one of two packed orientation sessions on Thursday, aspiring volunteers scribbled notes as they listened to Dennis Tseng, a cheerful 27-year-old, speak rapid-fire for nearly an hour about the nuts and bolts. The session, held adjacent to a cafe in Whole Foods, was so full that latecomers had to stand and lean against a wall.

“Right now, I could volunteer about five times a week,” said Emily Jimenez, 29, who lives on Staten Island and was laid off last month from the Milford Plaza hotel in Midtown. “If they’d want me to.”

Katherine Howie, an out-of-work lawyer, wrote “N/A currently” under employment information on the orientation forms. “I don’t mind making a commitment,” she said. “I’m happy to work with children, or sports, or recreation. I just want something to fill my time.”

Nini Duh, 29, was laid off from Lehman Brothers in September and now volunteers at any number of places — an elementary school, a finance workshop in Chinatown — nearly every day. It is a welcome change from her 100-hour weeks before her investment bank went bankrupt.