I disagree with all three of the points involved, though I'm not going to attempt to generalize this (eg. I'm not telling the rest of you that you should act this way).

1. Say Hello

This is dangerous. This is actively dangerous. I don't know if this is applicable elsewhere (though klienbl00 seems to have some stats on this), but where I live a very large portion of the homeless and panhandlers are mentally ill. When I first moved here, I tried to be compassionate, I tried to reach out, say hello, offer food and change when I had it. All I got was yelled at. And a guy swung a knife at me one time. In broad daylight, 2 in the afternoon on a saturday, at a bus station beside a grocery store.

I'm comfortable with putting my self-preservation before making others feel good. So point 1 fails for me.

2. Give (If You Can)

Maybe this is a good idea, in general. I like what the article has to say about not policing donations, etc. I've always felt that it must be a really degrading experience, as a panhandler, to have to deal with people trying to condition their donations to you. I also suspect that it's actively detrimental. Most of the research around concepts such as a universal basic income or some other direct cash transfers seem to show that it's more effective than restricted in-kind transfers, and I would assume that this extends to individual panhandlers.

That said, I no longer give money of any kind to panhandlers (see (1) above). I've dedicated a bunch of time to informing myself on the issue of poverty, and I believe I'm addressing it at a more effective location. As I mentioned above, many of the panhandlers are mentally ill, and if they had the proper support they would not need to pandhandle. So I have decided to do my particular part at the 'mental health support' level, donating my time and money to help support these institutions. I'm not going to tell you that you should actively avoid giving money to panhandlers directly and do this instead, but it's the choice I've made

3. Get Involved

I have a knee-jerk reaction against slacktivism, and am interested in efficient charity, and so I think that this point is exactly 100% wrong. The world doesn't need more volunteers. These problems are not constrained by unskilled human resources. Most volunteers are unable to realistically help with this sort of thing. The constraint is skilled labour (or money; you can generally trade money for skilled labour so these are interchangeable). Volunteering and advocacy tends to be more for the feel-good fuzzies of the volunteer, than for the actual solving of the problem.

I'm a white collar office worker who makes a good salary. My time is worth a fair chunk of change. Every hour I spend volunteering, is an hour I could have spent freelancing. And if I was so inclined, one hour of freelancing income donated will pay to hire like 5 volunteers for an hour. This is a much more effective way to "volunteer", especially for anyone with a job that affords them the freedom to read articles like this at work.

Finally, as for getting educated, this is actually a solid piece of advice. However, it's hard to follow through with, because there is a lot of mistaken information out there. For example, most of the links provided as examples are not actually valuable or actionable advice. "There is a shortage of affordable housing", is not completely true; it's true with caveats. There is a shortage of affordable housing in cities. And this is largely due to anti-development constraints (some natural, like available land, some artificial, like zoning, density, and max height regulations). At first glance, the link seems to be implying that this is the fault of the minimum wage being too low, but this is largely orthogonal to the problem at hand.