It’s not unusual to see throngs of people walk past their unhoused neighbors on the street without giving them a second glance.
But 5-year-old Eli Dewees is a boy filled with curiosity.
In late February, he walked right up to a person living on the streets and introduced himself.
Through conversation, Dewees learned that the person had recently been assaulted. He immediately began thinking of a way to protect his neighbor — and others like him — from getting hurt again.
So, he got out the markers and went to work making a sign he could share his mission. He drew a large heart beside a smiling stick figure with big, looping hands raised as fists.
With the help of his mother, Toni Dewees, he wrote: “This person has big fists. The sign says: powerful people have to show love. If we see a powerful person who isn’t showing love, we just show them this sign and show them love.”
When Dewees’ mom shared his sign online, she was immediately flooded with requests from people asking if they could buy it as a t-shirt.
So the Dewees family turned to New Horizon Communities, a Washington-based nonprofit that builds tiny home villages for people experiencing homelessness in Olympia.
Through the nonprofit, they began selling “big fists” shirts — and every cent went back to the same people that Dewees wanted to help.
At the time of publication, the “big fists” shirts had helped raise an estimated $3,000 for New Horizon — enough to secure permanent housing for two more tenants in the tiny home community.
On March 7, New Horizon held a pizza party where they honored Dewees as a “Tiny House Hero.”
“It’s just so sweet to see someone young and so innocent not having any presumptions of why that person is in the situation that they’re in,” Jaycie Osterberg-Brown, a staff member at New Horizon, told JOLT News, a Washington news outlet.
Toni Dewees said that Eli and his 9-year-old brother Viper have always been interested in helping people in their community. When asked what he would do as President, Viper once said he would make sure that everyone has a home.
“It’s the ‘anything is possible’ thinking that makes things possible,” their mother shared.
New Horizon executive director Colleen Carmichael said that attitudes like that give her hope.
“You hope the work we do here gets through,” said Carmichael.
“To see a 5-year-old understand the importance of being kind and loving to everyone, that’s what’s really going to make a difference for homelessness in general.”
As “meme-able” as the shirt is, Carmichael said that the heart of Dewees’ good deed was rooted in him going up to a stranger and having a conversation with someone who was struggling — something adults could stand to learn from.
“It’s that natural inclination to love other people that fear and trauma kind of suffocates,” Carmichael said.
“He’s a good lesson that we all have that capacity to love in us, sometimes we just kind of quiet that down and now’s really the time to open that back up again.”
Eli Dewees’ design is available for purchase on Bonfire.
Header images via Eli Dewees, Toni Dewees / Panza A Washington Nonprofit Corporation / New Horizon Communities
