Expanding Street Homelessness Outreach Events

Housing and Homelessness

Other:: Northeast LA

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

Being unhoused is a traumatic situation with unique causes for each person. A root cause, however, is the lack of a social safety net to prevent them from losing their housing (often due to income loss or other personal crises [1]). This process is caused [2] by a lack of permanent, affordable housing in LA, but services are also extremely limited for coexisting issues such as mental health, substance abuse, and medical treatment. This causes many people to have no choice but to suffer the dangerous and dehumanizing ordeal of living on the streets. [1]: https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/california-statewide-study-people-experiencing-homelessness [2]: Colburn, G., & Aldern, C. P. (2022). Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns.

NENO is a volunteer-run, volunteer-led community organization that does not operate as a service provider in its own right. However, our pool of dozens of dedicated volunteers is able to fill some of the gaps left in the city and county initiatives to combat homelessness by performing direct outreach to unhoused neighbors, building meaningful relationships, and helping them access existing services and programs. Originally a chapter of SELAH, in 2022 NENO became an independent 501(c)3 and is now the only direct outreach non-profit organization operating in the NE area of LA City (primarily the neighborhoods of Eagle Rock & Highland Park). NENO's weekly operations includes providing a bag of food to people on a "route", fulfilling requests for material items such as tents and harm-reduction supplies, and offering to connect people to programs that are available, such as Tiny Homes. On a less frequent basis, NENO hosts outreach events where mobile showers, charging stations, a beauty salon, and other services are available. These events have the ability to reach people beyond our normal "routes" and offer a wider array of services. They are also ideal points for people to connect directly with city and county resources. NENO plans to use this grant to grow these events as permanent, recurring features of our work occurring at predictable times and to add other services. As we expand this program, we also plan to grow our outreach route to encompass neighboring areas.

In addition to expanding the direct impact of our programs (measured by the number of unhoused people to whom we are able to provide services), NENO will continue to build support for the unhoused community among housed NELA residents (both by recruiting new volunteers and through expanded communications about housing issues). Through both our outreach and the direct service events, we hope make the experience of being unhoused in NELA less brutal and traumatic, and ideally to provide our participants with a pathway to housing through our advocacy. Through our emphasis on relationship building and trust, we believe we are uniquely equipped to help connect people with the services they actually need, and to advocate on their behalf. We also hope to build political support for policies (such as expanded construction of permanent supportive housing, expanded temporary shelter, better case management) in NELA.

Our existing outreach program distributes 80 bags of groceries per week, and has been ongoing for over 3 years. We additionally work to distribute 100s of tents, pairs of socks, clothing, hygeine kits, harm reduction kits, etc., to our participants each year. We also regularly work with case workers and council offices to connect people with housing, and to improve conditions in existing temporary housing sites (e.g., Tiny Homes). To measure our success for the planned (expanded) programming, we will tabulate the number of participants for each event, as well as the frequency each service was utilized. We also track and will report the supplies purchased with our funding and distributed to participants. We will continue to track our route participants. With city and/or county cooperation, we can also tabulate the number of people who are eventually placed into housing. More use of more services, as well as any number of people who are successfully housed, will constitute success.