Counseling Program for Homeless Starts
Mayor Tom Bradley and county Supervisor Ed Edelman on Friday joined a Skid Row anti-homeless agency in kicking off a modest but innovative program for fighting homelessness that they said represents a new weapon in tackling the seemingly intractable crisis.
The $70,000, five-month pilot program, jointly funded by the city and county, will pay salaries for social workers who will act as personal counselors to homeless individuals, matching them with existing specialized programs that can steer them into jobs, permanent housing, alcohol treatment or other services.
Maxene Johnston, director of the Weingart Center on Skid Row, which will oversee the program, said that while her agency has fed 21,000 individuals and housed thousands more, such efforts are not enough to return the homeless to mainstream life.
Johnston said that while there are no scientific studies on the subject, she believes that most individuals and families who spend more than a week on the streets “fall into a downward spiral that makes it almost impossible to prevent their becoming the long-term homeless.”
She said the specialized counselors will be able to get transportation, arrange appointments, handle phone calls and offer other assistance to link homeless individuals to a vast array of existing programs that they now find out about “by accident, if at all.”
32 Hours a Week in Line
Johnston cited a San Francisco study that showed that homeless people are forced to spend about 32 hours a week standing in lines to get food, make phone calls, talk to a social worker, sign up for job-training, use a bathroom, line up a bed for the night, get a shower or secure other necessities.
Because homelessness “is practically a full-time job,” she said, few of the homeless are able to pull themselves out of the cycle on the streets without personal assistance from a knowledgeable social worker. And, Johnston said, as they stay longer on the streets, the costs of serving them skyrocket because alcoholism, drug use and mental problems strike “even the most steady of them.”
Bradley and Edelman expressed optimism that the pilot program, known as the Homeless Evaluation and Linkage Program, or HELP, will be successful enough to warrant more extensive funding from both governmental entities.
“I don’t know whether anyone can tell you whether or not we can fully solve the problem,” Bradley said. But, he added, he will seek City Council funding and county funding to turn the pilot effort into a full-fledged program if it is successful.
Edelman, who along with Supervisor Kenneth Hahn is funding the program out of discretionary funds from the supervisors’ individual district budgets, said he is convinced that beds and food for the homeless “are simply not enough.”
He said that while the conservative-dominated Board of Supervisors may not go along with funding a new social program even if the pilot succeeds, he and Hahn can still find more money, earmarked for their own districts, to turn HELP into a permanent program.
