L.A. Buses Will Carry Ads to Help the Homeless : Poverty: The national campaign includes a $2-toll phone number with a recording that informs callers about what they can do to help.

An ad campaign bannered across the sides of thousands of buses nationally--including hundreds in Los Angeles--seeks to remind Americans that there is still a war to be fought at home.

Within the next week, signs on the sides of about 400 RTD buses in Los Angeles will carry the message “Homelessness Happens.” The ads, which feature color portraits of three homeless people, list a $2-toll phone number that people who want to help can dial: 1-900-CAN-U-GIVE.

A recording informs people what they can do--and who else they can call--to help the homeless. The money from the phone tolls will be donated to homeless organizations, including Shelter Partnership in Los Angeles.

The space for the ads is being donated by New York-based Transportation Displays Inc., one of the country’s largest sellers of bus advertising space. Transportation Displays also created the ads.

“I’ve traveled to more than 40 cities over the past year, and there’s not a city I went to where I didn’t recognize a homeless problem,” said William M. Apfelbaum, president and chief executive of Transportation Displays. “I wanted to do something more than give money.”

Instead, Transportation Displays donated more than $1 million in bus exterior ad space. It also spent $100,000 on printing and producing the bus signs.

“I know the timing isn’t so good,” said Apfelbaum, in reference to all the interest in the Persian Gulf War. “But these signs were already being printed when the war started, and we decided to go ahead with it.”

Besides Los Angeles, the ads will appear in 35 cities, including San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington and New York. The people whose faces appear in the ads are homeless from New York who volunteered to be pictured. Photos of their faces were silk-screened, then painted over by artists.

Officials from several homeless organizations that stand to benefit from this campaign say they have no idea if it will help them raise many thousands of dollars, or very little.

“It’s a crap shoot,” said Joan Alker, assistant director at the Washington-based National Coalition for the Homeless. “You can’t look at an ad and find out all about homelessness in America, but you can look at it and decide to find out more.”

“I don’t think anything like this has been done before” for the homeless, said Ruth Schwartz, executive director of Shelter Partnership, a nonprofit Los Angeles group that provides technical and material support to Los Angeles organizations that offer shelter to the homeless. “People who call will be specifically told how they can help.”