What started as a few conversations with the homeless of Boston in the summer of 2014 soon turned into a life passion for Andrew O’Brien (COL ’18). The injustice of homelessness spurred O’Brien to create a magazine featuring interviews with individuals experiencing homelessness entitled “Profiles of D.C.’s Homeless.”

O’Brien began the project in September as part of “Ethics of Entrepreneurship,” a Georgetown seminar that provided students with $1,000 to create an entrepreneurship project that addresses a social issue.

According to O’Brien, the issue of homelessness is so ubiquitous in D.C. that it is often neglected.

“When I got to D.C., I saw many people experiencing homelessness everywhere I went. After a while, I realized that I had stopped noticing them as much, but they were still there of course, and that’s the problem: when you’re surrounded by something, you see it without truly feeling it. The absurdity of homelessness is lost in its ubiquity,” O’Brien said.

For two and a half months, O’Brien interviewed and photographed people on the streets of Georgetown who were experiencing homelessness, then edited the content into a magazine.

“[I] started talking to all the homeless people I met, getting their stories, building bonds and eventually saw what a great thing it would be to tell their fantastic stories to everyone, to make people realize that these individuals, who they may walk by everyday, are as full of life and love as anyone [they]’ll ever meet,” O’Brien said.

After completing the magazine, O’Brien contacted the National Coalition for the Homeless hoping to promote his magazine. The coalition provided funds to print 125 initial copies.

O’Brien plans to distribute his magazine to as many people as possible through Amazon and tabling on campus. He plans to charge $10 per copy. The profits will be used to help fund Solidarity Press, a publishing collective that O’Brien created for this project.

O’Brien said that he hopes to expand Solidarity Press by cooperating with socially conscious businesses.

“To keep Solidarity Press sustainable while spreading the word on innovative social change, I’d very much like to begin coverage of social businesses [that] make a profit while still ensuring the well-being of all stakeholders from production to distribution, like Misfit Juicery or Atla Gracia,” O’Brien said.

Director of Community Organizing for the National Coalition for the Homeless Michael Stoops said that he was very impressed with O’Brien’s initiative.

“It was one of the quickest, most successful turn-around projects that I’ve ever seen a student do,” Stoops said.

David Pirtle, a speaker for Faces of Homelessness, a bureau of the National Coalition for the Homeless which helped O’Brien profile his interviewees, praised O’Brien’s magazine for not perpetuating stereotypes about homeless people.

“The typical lazy reporter will go out and interview the first homeless person he sees and then say that they represent all homeless people,” Stoops said. “[O’Brien] understands that the homeless population is not monolithic.”

O’Brien said that he never had to intentionally avoid stereotypes, and that his interview subjects covered a diverse range.

“People have said that they’re surprised at how different all these profiles are, and people have asked me if I approached this with any angle to avoid stereotypes,” said O’Brien. “The truth is that I never had to intentionally avoid stereotypes for the simple reason that these homeless stereotypes don’t exist in reality.”

O’Brien approached his subjects by offering them water, then discussed political or housing issues with them. Eventually, O’Brien asked if they wanted to be profiled in his magazine.

“To be honest, if I were in their shoes and some college kid came up to me and asked for my life story after a bit of small talk, I don’t think I would have been as kind,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien said that he was surprised by how frankly his subjects spoke about personal issues.

“It was amazing how quickly my talks with the dozens of people I interviewed proceeded from small talk, to talking about incredibly personal subjects, like past abuses and failures, which would eventually be included in the magazine,” O’Brien said.

Pirtle, one of O’Brien’s interviewees, was particularly impressed by O’Brien’s interviewing skills when it came to discussing emotional memories.

“He was always able to get past the regular spiel … and really get into the heart of the story,” Pirtle said. “I think sharing stories like these is the most effective way to build empathy for a population for whom people don’t have a lot of empathy.”

At Georgetown, O’Brien is a board member of Georgetown Homeless Outreach Programs and Education. He moderated their most recent event, “Issue of the Month: Homelessness is a Women’s Issue.”

O’Brien has been awarded the Figge Fellowship, an initiative in the Catholic Studies Program for undergraduates interested in dialogues about faith and social issues. He said he saw the fellowship as an opportunity to further investigate the role of faith among homeless individuals.

“I wondered how the public’s perceptions and misconceptions of homeless individuals might affect the formation of this kind of faith within the homeless population,” O’Brien said. “That’s what I’m studying now: stigma and faith.”

Ultimately, O’Brien said that he hopes to make readers aware of the complexities of the issue of homelessness.

“New and artistic representation of social justice issues is key in getting people to rethink these familiar problems, to see them in a new light,” O’Brien said.