Heart Broken But Hopeful
It has been an interesting and enlightening week as we’ve gone out with a group called Common Ground and community volunteers, taking surveys of people who are homeless on the streets of Skid Row in order to make a registry of people. This registry or database will be utilized to hopefully connect the most vulnerable people on the streets with permanent supportive housing, and they will be surrounded by care, counseling and services.
This is really the answer for those we would describe as the most challenging, chronic 10% of the population of homeless people. These are folks devastated by years of homelessness, addiction, sickness, attacks, and mental health issues who literally are knocking on death’s door if someone or some plan does not intervene. LA County Sheriff Lee Baca describes our streets not as Skid Row, but as death row. For an estimated 500 to 750 on these streets, intervention with permanent supportive housing needs to happen now rather than later, or the numbers of people will not be decreased by anything positive, but will truly happen through death.
This is why Union Rescue jumped in with Common Ground and other caring folks, including the Deputy Mayor of Housing and Economic Development Policy for the City of Los Angeles, Helmi Hisserich, to survey the folks on the streets. URM had nearly 15 volunteers, including myself and Senior Staff, out on the streets at 4:00 A.M. 3 mornings this week. I believe in this intervention so much, that I offered for URM to sponsor the count for $10,000. The leaders of Common Ground had a better idea. They are taking our $10,000, and asking others to throw what they can into the pot, and then we are going to take the combined pot, so to speak, and find the 2 or 3 most vulnerable people out of the hundreds we surveyed, and we are going to place those 2 or 3 immediately into permanent-supportive housing.
This means that the two octogenarian ladies Helmi and I met this morning might have an opportunity to move from the streets filled with rats where they slept, into an apartment of their own, and as one of the little ladies said, “with Security?”
Or the 50 year old woman I met who has been on the streets 30 years of her life, and is in and out of the hospital regularly with epileptic seizures may have a chance to experience some quality of life.
What broke my heart as we finished up this morning were the hundreds who we will have no immediate answers for; a young woman, barely in her 20’s talking to herself angrily as she walked by, a young woman moaning after she just shot up heroin in the self cleaning toilet out on San Pedro Street, a young man selling himself and stationing himself on Skid Row because “that is where I have access to more drugs”.
I am encouraged by what I learned in our time on the streets — steps that Union Rescue Mission can take to be a more welcoming, caring place, and ways we can partner with others to work towards the day when it will be a rarity to find someone living on the streets of this City of Angels. Pray for us.
Bless you,
Andy B.