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This is a difficult and confusing time. Many of us are navigating a new normal and have questions about what to do and how we can support our neighbors experiencing homelessness during this pandemic.

Luckily, there are a lot of things that you can do from wherever you’re sitting and while practicing the recommended physical distancing. Whatever resources you have at the moment and whatever experience or skills you bring with you, we need your support.

1. Donate to the United Way of Greater Los Angeles Pandemic Relief Fund to help us reduce the spread of the virus in homeless encampments and shelters, and help pay the bills for people in danger of losing their homes.
2. Contact an Everyone In organizer and discuss how you can get plugged into our work in your own neighborhood.
3. Read the HealthyLA Coalition demands in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and take action from your laptop or phone to demand protections for our most vulnerable populations.
4. Read about the plan to end homelessness in L.A. County on our website.
5. Watch these video profiles of outreach workers on our YouTube channel and share them.
6. Check out the Housing Map on our website and find out how much supportive and affordable housing is in your neighborhood.
7. Participate in an Orientation Call and tweet out one thing you learned to us @Everyonein_LA.
8. Call one of your elected representatives at the city or county level and tell them that you support the more than half a million renters who are rent burdened and made more vulnerable by the COVID-19 outbreak.
9. Invite a friend to join the movement to end homelessness in L.A. County.
10. Recruit someone to join an online workshop, where you’ll learn more about how to make a positive for people experiencing homelessness in your community.

Over the past few weeks, we have been fortunate to join outreach workers across L.A. County to witness the work they do to end homelessness in their communities. All of their great work is made possible not only by volunteerism and small donations, but also by coordination with L.A. County through voter-funded measures.

We already have introduced you to Eric, an outreach supervisor in the San Fernando Valley who works in encampments with Saia and Sonia, two peer advocates he helped to house. You’ve met Renee, a housing navigator in Pomona who matches her clients with housing on the same streets where she once lived. 

Now, we’re excited to share Jeannie’s and Amanda’s stories.

Jeannie is a Family and Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner at the Northeast Valley Health Corporation Transition to Wellness Clinic in North Hollywood. Many of Jeannie’s patients are referred by case managers at LA Family Housing, located next door.

Four days a week, Jeannie works in the clinic providing psychiatric care and mental health evaluations to patients of all ages. Wednesdays are spent at a local church that provides showers and meals to community members. Jeannie is on-site to address any mental and physical health needs, while partners from LA Family Housing provide clients access to housing resources and ID vouchers, as well as help them set up appointments for other medical services back at the clinic.

On Saturdays, Jeannie continues coordinating with LA Family Housing and meets with an outreach team for a full day out in the field. Accompanied by a mental health specialist and a peer advocate, she meets with clients that have been identified during the week as candidates for additional care. If nobody has asked for services, the team surveys encampments and other areas where our neighbors sleep outside to help provide essential medical services—like treating wounds and refilling prescriptions—and start building relationships.

“Everybody’s entitled to medical care and getting mental health therapy and housing. I love helping people and I love medicine,” says Jeannie. 

“My purpose is to tell people it’s ok to need help and need support.”

Amanda Alvarado is an Outreach Coordinator for LA Family Housing. 

After serving as a Substance Use Specialist for several years, Amanda now focuses on relationship-building, an essential element of service-providing. Because so many people experiencing homelessness have dealt with trauma and abuse, establishing a trusting, caring relationship critically informs the work between service providers and clients toward the ultimate goals of getting off the street, moving into housing, and building a sustainable, stable life. 

Each day as an outreach coordinator is different for Amanda, as she travels between encampments, transports clients to appointments, trains new outreach workers, and helps place at-risk individuals and families into immediate housing. 

The good news is that, thanks to Mayor Garcetti’s A Bridge Home initiative, five more bridge housing facilities will soon be available to Amanda’s clients. 

Amanda explains the benefits:

“[Immediate housing] is a short-term place where people on the streets can go, they have access to case management, to showers, to three meals a day, to safety”, she said, “This is where they get connected to whatever resources they need because it does take time to find housing for people. This is a time in-between being on the street and having housing where they have some form of stability to get to where the goal is.”

Rapid rehousing, made possible by voter-approved funding, is another key part of Amanda’s work. While this program is implemented differently based on the needs of her clients, the general structure is this: rapid rehousing helps pay the first and last month’s rent and security deposit, as well as a diminishing percentage of the monthly rent in order to keep at-risk clients in their existing housing, or help them find housing more quickly. 

Rapid rehousing helps prevent evictions from turning into chronic homelessness. 

When asked about her favorite part of this work, Amanda unsurprisingly points to the relationships she’s able to build with her clients. 

“The people on the streets are no different than any of us,” she says. “I tell them all the time that I’m no different than them and to just realize that everyone has a story. My clients are the most resilient, strong individuals in the world.”

Thanks to voter-approved funding, Jeannie and Amanda are two of now hundreds of outreach workers that provide the support, relationship-building, and direct services that help to house 133 people every single day in Los Angeles. 

And while we have so much more work to do to end homelessness, real, significant progress is happening. 

This blog is part of a series across our campaign where we highlight the people working to end homelessness. 

Learn more by texting (213) 429-4830 or checking out our FAQ page here. 

How are homeless agencies responding to COVID-19?

We’ve been hearing a lot of understandable concern pertaining to COVID-19 and its impact on people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County. We are encouraged to see how eager people are to provide support to our most vulnerable neighbors, so here are a few important things you should know.

How you can help:

• United Way of Greater Los Angeles has created a Pandemic Relief Fund to provide financial and physical support to people living outside, as well as very low-income individuals and families at high-risk. Proceeds will support outreach teams and organizations that are providing medical care to people living outside and in shelters, improving and sanitizing shelters, and supporting other vulnerable populations, like food vendors, who are at risk of losing their jobs and homes.

Developments and updates:

• Mayor Garcetti has called for a temporary ban on all evictions in the city of Los Angeles, including commercial properties occupied by businesses that are impacted by closures. The L.A. City Council held its first vote on the evictions moratorium on Tuesday, March 17. We expect the citywide measure to be finalized as early as Tuesday, March 24. A similar bill has been proposed to protect renters statewide.

• The Los Angeles Unified School District has closed all schools for the next two weeks and will be operating 40 family resource centers and 20 grab-and-go food centers to provide food for low-income students. That includes the 18,000 students experiencing homelessness.

• At least six major utility companies in California have announced that they will not shut off water and utilities until at least the end of March.

Support systems:

• Outreach workers and homeless service agencies are hard at work supporting their clients with hygiene supplies and training, as well as coordinating to ensure that people have access to food and other essentials.

• The Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority portal has provided information on how they’re addressing the crisis, including resources to help partner agencies prepare their staff to support clients and myth-busters on how the virus is passed and ways to protect yourself.

• The L.A. County Department of Public Health portal provides information on the county’s response, including an updated tally of affected people, what to do if you are exposed, and how to recognize symptoms.

To echo the sentiments expressed by health care professionals everywhere: wash your hands thoroughly and often, avoid group settings, and keep your hands away from your face. And a final note on top of that: practice compassion, patience, and unselfishness. Together, we’re all going to get through this.

We get this question all the time. The answer is: a lot.

Three years ago this past week, the voters of L.A. County passed Measure H and dedicated unprecedented resources to fighting homelessness. Since then, our collective work has tripled the size of the homelessness response system and produced thousands of outreach workers and caseworkers to connect people on the streets to housing and services that never existed before.

Thanks to this critical investment, people experiencing homelessness in L.A. have increased access to mental health care, medical care, substance use counseling, rent assistance, immediate housing, and so much more.

As a direct result of these services and investments, 133 people move from homelessness into housing every day.

We are committed to sharing this fact—and the work that is happening every day—because when people don’t know what’s happening, they assume nothing is. In reality, there are outreach workers across L.A. County who are connecting people to medical services, substance use counseling, and housing every single day.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll see billboards, buses, and even trains carrying our message. Look for the big, bright colors. Our goal is to attack the cynicism that suggests “nothing is happening,” and help people better understand both what is happening and what we need to do to create even more progress.

We’re really excited to share the stories of outreach workers, medical teams, housing navigators, and many other dedicated people who are working with people experiencing homelessness. It’s important to recognize all of the progress they are making as well as the barriers they face in their work to bring #EveryoneIn. Stay tuned, there is much more to come.

Text us at  213-429-4830 to find out what people are doing to end homelessness.

Out of an abundance of caution regarding the recent outbreak of COVID-19, we’re postponing Gather Everyone In 2020.

This annual event, where we come together as a community to lift each other up and champion those who are working to end homelessness, means a lot to us. It fuels our work and strengthens our bonds. However, health and safety come first.

That said, we’re not giving up this opportunity to grow and empower our community. Here are three things you can do from the comfort of your home or office:

• Join the Everyone In Home Team. Our Facebook group has over 2,000 members and is a great place to connect, share stories, and get (virtually) organized.
• Sign up for an orientation call. Every couple of weeks, our Everyone In organizing team hosts a conference call where they update our community on the status of the crisis and talk about ways to take action and make change.
• Contact your Everyone In organizer. Whether you’re looking to get more involved or you just have a question about homelessness, our organizers are a great resource.

Thank you for being a part of our community. We’re sorry we won’t get a chance to see each other in person this weekend, but we feel good about this decision.

This movement doesn’t stop or slow down. We will continue to organize in our communities and advocate for solutions to end homelessness.

Be safe, keep washing your hands, and let’s get to work.

“Black History Month must be more than just a month of remembrance; it should be a tribute to our history and reminder of the work that lies in the months and years ahead.” —Marty Meehan

February 20 was World Day of Social Justice, and this year the United Nations announced a theme of “closing the inequalities gap to achieve social justice.” The homelessness crisis is a social justice issue, and it’s one that disproportionately affects black people.

The housing and homelessness crisis inherently is racist. It always has been. 

During Black History Month, we focused on the parts of black history that continue to impact black and African American communities: the ever-widening wage and wealth gap between black households and non-Hispanic white households, the plummeting rate of black homeownership, lower now than it has been since 1968, and the growing number of black individuals and families that these factors have forced onto the street. 

We see the racism of the housing and homelessness crisis when black Americans make up 13% of the overall population and 52% of families who experience homelessness. We see it when the rate of black homeownership is over 30% lower than it is for white families: a 50-year low. We see it in a 2016 study showing that median black wealth per household was $17,100, while for white households it was $170,180. That’s a 10-to-1 ratio. These statistics aren’t built overnight, but rather they result from generations of pervasive inequity. We all must acknowledge this history in order to change it.

The scars of racism and wealth inequality certainly are apparent here in Los Angeles. Homeowners surrounded by neighbors suffering and dying on the streets resist the construction of shelters and affordable housing in their neighborhoods, concerned that the proximity of people experiencing homelessness, among whom black Americans are vastly over-represented, will make their homes less valuable. In reality, affordable housing units remain consistently rented in any financial climate and residents are able to build personal wealth, providing more security and tax revenue to communities than market-rate housing. Closing the racial wealth gap that was built over centuries of discrimination and systemized oppression will require broad, bold changes on a national scale. As we approach one of the most pivotal elections we may ever see, it’s up to us to make sure that we elect lawmakers who are committed to making housing accessible to all.

Last month, hundreds of South Bay residents gathered in Torrance for our latest Stories From The Frontline event.

This edition of Stories From The Frontline felt special—not only because it was our eighth gathering (which is in itself, incredible), but because each speaker shared a different reality of our homelessness and housing crisis in 2019.

Throughout the course of the evening, we heard from our neighbors who had been evicted, who had suffered from domestic violence, who had experienced addiction and trauma, and who never could have imagined that they would be sleeping on the streets.

We also heard from neighbors who have dedicated their lives to the solutions to homelessness—specifically, working to create as much supportive and affordable housing as we can throughout Los Angeles.

All of the speakers spoke to a single, universal truth about this crisis, particularly in Los Angeles. That truth? That all of us could be one paycheck, one medical emergency, one tragedy away from potentially becoming homelessness.

[See the recap video below]

It’s this reality that binds us together in the fight for holistic solutions.

Yes, we need more supportive and affordable housing—but we also need an increase in trauma-informed care in street outreach.

Yes, we need more shelters and mental health services, but we also need a greater commitment to fund programs that help vulnerable youth and at-risk seniors before they end up on the streets.

Amber, our emcee, put this sentiment poignantly: “These events are special because people need to hear these stories…These stories are how we change the mindset about homelessness in our communities and beyond.”

One of our storytellers, Andrew, is a veteran who struggled with homelessness for years until supportive housing and services helped him get back on his feet.

Andrew spoke at Stories From The Frontline because he wanted his experience to help educate the public on the struggles that many housing-insecure veterans (over 3,000 as of the last Homeless Count data) face in Los Angeles.

Andrew wants to help lead our fight for solutions, to be an example of why supportive housing is more than 90% effective at ending homelessness.

His story is proof that supportive housing works.

Andrew was just one of many speakers who left an indelible impact on us and the community residents that showed up to hear from their neighbors.

Our South Bay edition of Stories From The Frontline was moving, inspiring, and unforgettable.

We hope to see you at our next event in 2020.