This morn­ing I stepped out of a Star­bucks and like in many stores in New York City, there was a man (they are almost always men) who looked hun­gry and opened the door for me and asked for change. I had no change on me what­so­ever, because I had just come from the gym.

So he asked, “How about a cof­fee?” And I asked, “Really? Would you really want a coffee?”

I was happy to buy a cof­fee. What you worry about, espe­cially if you are inter­ested in giv­ing larger amounts is: Are they going to use the money for food (which you are happy to help with), or some­thing else, like drugs and alco­hol.

In China, for exam­ple, I would often be approached by peo­ple ask­ing for money for a bus fare to get back home or for food. Skep­ti­cal, I would say, “I’ll go to the bus sta­tion and buy you a ticket.” (Or restau­rant). Then as we were walk­ing, they would often change their mind or say “Nev­er­mind” and come up with an excuse to leave. That often left me a bad taste in my mouth, because I, like many peo­ple, really do want to help those in need. And I would feel vin­di­cated by my skepticism.

The prob­lem is that the bad actors among the group taint it for every­one else who is actu­ally des­per­ate enough to ask for money. And New York City actu­ally actively dis­cour­ages peo­ple from giv­ing change to pan­han­dlers, encour­ag­ing them to call 311 instead. I’ve done a fair bit of report­ing on home­less issues, both sym­pa­thetic and entirely skep­ti­cal. As much as we ratio­nally tell our­selves, the home­less should go to soup kitchens or social ser­vice agen­cies, some­times the peo­ple just need some­thing to eat, and that is a hard .

I walked back into the Star­bucks, and ordered a large cof­fee. I noticed the nice gift cards that they always have on dis­play at the cashier, and had an impulse. I told the cashier to add a $10 gift card to pur­chase. After all, Star­bucks has a range of food (if mediocre and over­priced). That would be enough to get a sand­wich, salad or pastries.

He was really sur­prised to get the card, and was at first puz­zled how it worked. But I said he could just use it to pay, like a credit card. And he seemed really touch.

I then won­dered, if there is a model to this? Where we could give gift cards to eater­ies and super­mar­kets instead of change. If any­thing, it would be prompt us to be more gen­er­ous? I’d only give a few quar­ters or what­ever, of change, but I’m happy to give $5 for food, because that is the amount for a meal.

I looked around to see if this model had been done before — espe­cially now since gift cards are so pop­u­lar for mer­chants, in part because a per­cent­age of redeemed.

There was a burst of voucher sys­tems in Chicago, Seat­tle, Port­land, Ore., San Fran­cisco, Berke­ley and Santa Cruz, Calif., Boul­der, Colo. And Sen­a­tor Jeff Binga­man, a Demo­c­rat from New Mex­ico, pro­posed leg­is­la­tion in 1993 to cre­ate an Amer­ica Cares voucher sys­tem that would pro­vide start-up money in more than 60 cities.

I was most intrigued by the New Haven project, called New Haven Cares, which is almost 20 years old and still going strong.

Guess who helped cre­ate it? Matthew Lieber­man, the son of United States Sen­a­tor Joseph I. Lieber­man, then a third-year law stu­dent at Yale. It was in response to the fact that one day dur­ing his child­hood, he gave a home­less per­son $3 in New Haven, but his mom, a psy­chi­atric social worker, told him that many of the pan­han­dlers spent their money on liquor and wound up at the front door of the men­tal health center.

Could New York City cre­ate a pro­gram like this? Or, as skep­tics note, would the cards would just be resold?