You give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. You teach a man to fish, and you watch him change the world.
That old but applicable cliche was stated by 23- year- old Patrick McConlogue, a software engineer in New York City who made a potentially life-changing proposal to a homeless man while walking to work one day.
Leo Grand is a 37- year- old homeless man with a love for computers who had been sleeping in shelters and on the street for the last two years, ever since condominiums built near his home drove up the rent and resulted in his eviction. McConlogue approached Grand one day and made him an offer — one hundred dollars, or a laptop and lessons in computer coding. McConlogue vowed to spend one hour a day for the next two months in order to teach Grand a job skill that could turn his entire life around for the better and give a leg up to one of the thousands of homeless people forced to use the streets of New York as their home, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom.
When the TODAY show asked Grand what he thought of McConlogue’s offer, Grand replied:
I came to an immediate decision… The hundred dollars will last you for a short time. Learning how to code will last you for a lifetime.
So, McConlogue, true to his word, bought Grand a laptop and three textbooks on coding. He went on to tutor Grand over the next two months, and the homeless coder is currently working on a free app intended to promote carpooling and hedge against global warming.
Of Grand, McConlogue said:
The speed at which I’m going through these lessons is insane. We barely cover things twice. His memory is really, really good.
Grand has proven to be more than an apt student, but an apt student with passion, discipline, and more motivation than your average coder.
Grand’s understanding and quick grasping of coding has gone so well, in fact, that he hopes to find a place of his own to live soon, as well as score a job somewhere he can not only put his new-found skills to use, but continue to develop them. He hopes his journey will help dispel some of the inaccurate stereotypes out there regarding the homeless.
All homeless people are mentally ill, lazy, unintelligent — that’s the stigma… It doesn’t really matter [what] your living arrangements [are] as long as you’ve got the mindset to do it and the will.
Leo Grand certainly has that, and luckily, so did Patrick McConlogue. Good luck to both of them as they reach out to change the world for a better, greener future.
Hard Knocks & Hard-Drives
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