Neighbors for Home 2.0

Affordable housing and homelessness

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

We cannot solve homelessness in Los Angeles without attending to the critical and growing issue of vehicular homelessness, with over 22,000 adults and children living in their vehicles, comprising more than 40% – the largest segment – of the unsheltered homeless population.
The participants in our safe parking programs are our neighbors. They are teachers, social workers, gig workers, grandparents, college students, and Veterans. When they became homeless, sheltering in their car became their first, only, or best option. Safe Parking LA’s participants are forced to sleep in their vehicles due to the lack of safe and viable shelter options and limited access to supportive services. They are overlooked or not prioritized by existing systems of care until they fall further into crisis. That is why we have evolved beyond a safe place to park to become an agency with more comprehensive services to meet the needs of our population.

Safe Parking LA’s Neighbors for Home 2.0 is a relaunch and redesign of a project halted during the pandemic, raising issue awareness and connecting neighborhood service groups and community members to local safe parking programs for people experiencing vehicular homelessness.
Through a place-based recruitment strategy, we will target the neighborhoods surrounding our safe parking program locations for outreach and engage neighbors to serve their neighbors. Our measurable objective is to recruit 100 volunteers for Neighbors for Home 2.0 within one year after the official launch (pending funding). We already have a waiting list of 35+ volunteers and growing, not including our 13-member Board of Directors.
Volunteers will help by providing leveraged resources such as meals, wellness activities, and donated items, and – just as important – contribute to a greater sense of community crucial in building support networks and addressing isolation among our unhoused service recipients. Best practices show that fostering community and support networks significantly improves mental health and stability, aiding in stabilizing our participants and nurturing forward movement toward their path to permanent housing.

If Neighbors for Home 2.0 is successful, Angelenos will better understand and embrace the vast number of people who live in their cars and have nowhere else to turn. Time and again, we hear stories from our participants about how unsafe and unwelcome they felt throughout various Los Angeles neighborhoods and from a wide range of community members prior to enrolling in our safe parking program. We envision a Los Angeles where such high rates of stigmatization and othering ends and a fuller sense of community and belonging for ALL neighbors – housed and unhoused – begins.

We plan to measure impact through the following metrics:
1. Volunteer Engagement: Number of volunteers recruited, trained, activated, and retained (when applicable), especially tracking for activity within client-facing volunteer roles such as lot hosts, meal providers, community lot meeting sponsors, and welcome ambassadors. This includes calculating the value of volunteer hours and leveraged resources.
2. Community Engagement: Number of partnerships, collaborations, and people reached through awareness-building and recruitment.
3. Client Outcomes: Number of people served, the duration of their stay, and their progress toward stable housing.
We have established systems to capture, report, and analyze data, ensuring an infrastructure for tracking and measuring these metrics. Furthermore, qualitative feedback will be solicited from participants, volunteers, and staff to inform initiative design.