Greetings from sunny Los Angeles!This week Beth Sandor and I are delighted to be working with PATH Partners as they create the registry and apply the Vulnerability Index to the street homeless population in West Hollywood.
Tomorrow morning is our last 4 am wake-up. The sleep deprivation that is an unavoidable part of this work tends to really kick in on the last day and further warp our sense of humor. Tomorrow should be fun!
As you can see from the photo to the right, Beth and I are really suffering here in West Hollywood. We're competing to see who can enter the Vulnerability Index survey results into the quickbase database the fastest. As usual, Beth won.
Monday night, we atteneded Santa Monica's briefing on the results of their annual point in time homeless count. Congratulations for achieving an 8% reduction in homelessness!
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2 comments:
The experience last week was amazing and I learned alot with my friends from PATH and from Common Ground. Getting at the root causes, of which there are many, of homelessness has been a passion of mine for years. Beyond feeding or clothing our brothers and sisters, we must certainly gather data - most importantly, we must love them with everything we've got. Thanks for the work we do and I hope our paths cross again. When will there be a shelter in WEHO?
Hi - thanks for posting, Mark of Many Paths World Services! I honestly have no idea about a shelter in WEHO or even who to ask. We'd recommend housing over shelter, though, for two reasons: (1) housing costs less than shelter, and (2) being homeless in a shelter - even a good one - still puts you at a risk of dying that is 3 to 4 times the general population. It's better than the streets, but not nearly as good as a home. So if housing costs less anyways, we'd recommend skipping the shelter entirely and get right to the housing.
What do other people think about shelters versus housing? Would love to hear some thoughts on this.
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