Homeless From L.A.’s Skid Row Protest Snub by Health Forum

About 15 people who live in makeshift homes on Los Angeles’ Skid Row traveled to Buena Park on Friday to picket a Southern California Health Assn. conference on the “Challenge of the Homeless.”

Members of the Los Angeles Union of the Homeless spent several days last week passing the word along Skid Row that the association was planning the conference but had not invited any homeless participants.

So at 6 a.m. Friday, they gathered at a corner parking lot at Jullien and 6th streets, boarded vans and headed to the conference with picket signs in hand.

“We feel that if you want to know what the problem is, if you want to know what the real solution is, you need to ask the people who are impacted,” said Susan Gosman, an executive board member of the Los Angeles Union of the Homeless.

Even if invited, those without permanent homes would not have been able to afford the $45 conference fee, “so they are effectively cut out of the conference,” Gosman said.

Gosman termed it “a blatant example of how people can think they can speak for the homeless,” but Dr. Ellen Alkon called it a conference of professionals who, for the most part, consider themselves advocates of programs for the homeless.

“That’s why this conference is being held, to increase their knowledge and learn other ways to help the homeless,” Alkon said of the biannual daylong meeting, attended Friday by about 135 people from Southern California.

Speakers used videotapes of the homeless, Alkon said. Topics of discussion included access to health-care systems and health problems.

Candy Lewis, an artist who works with the the Los Angeles Union of the Homeless, said it was a “slap in the face” that the picketers were not allowed to sit in on the conference Friday.

The union, an organization founded and run by homeless people, also used the picketing to announce a new program, the “Homeless Winter Offensive Campaign.”

The program will involve events staged on several days.

One will be on Christmas Day, when the group plans a special dinner where attention will be focused on the growing number of homeless people in Los Angeles County. Gosman said conservative estimates put that number at 50,000.

Another will be on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, celebrated next year on Jan. 19, when the group plans to “symbolically take over a repossessed house” and give it to a veteran and his family.