Community Wealth is Healthy People

Income inequality

Central LA

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

It's through the lived experience lens that our organization addresses income inequality and community safety. The vast majority of our staff have lived, or continue to live, in Skid Row. Over the last 19 years, Skid Row has lived through all sorts of services, campaigns, promises, and interventions intended to uplift the community. That experience is what informs our understanding of what culturally-relevant innovation in Skid Row actually is; solutions that go beyond capitalism, because it's those same ways of being that continue to keep people outside the economic, experiential, cultural bubbles of traditional advancement.

This grant will support income inequality and community safety by supporting The Peace and Healing Center as a free space for Skid Row residents, sheltered and unsheltered, to rest, be loved on, and access resources like arts & culture programming, nutritious food & drink, and all the benefits of a third space. The Center is where Skid Row residents can first grow in our culture of healing forward, and with our recent acquisition of Skid Row People's Market to add to our employment social enterprise offerings with The Hip Hop Smoothie Shop and Skid Row Coffee, we have developed a pathway to dignified work rooted in cultural relevance and community. We are creating more than jobs or hiring people with barriers to employment. Community wealth is healthy people, and for Skid Row community members to heal from decades of discrimination, marginalization, violence, and trauma, we have built a whole-person approach that meets the dynamic realities of lived experience.

Homelessness services and its many intersections may be at a crossroads. The effectiveness of our tax dollars is being questioned, and recently Governor Newsom has called for further criminalization of poverty. While theorizing solutions to income inequality and reimagining public safety are necessary steps towards an LA that is equitable, thriving, engaged, and empowering, it's become clear that the status quo way of doing things isn't sufficient. We believe what we are building is not only innovative, but scalable. So if our work is successful, it will contribute to a new way forward, a way where spaces of belonging are coupled with social entrepreneurship in low-income neighborhoods, and where LA County continues investing in lived experience leadership and de-centering traditional hierarchical structures.