Volunteers Reach Out to Women on Skid Row

Loretta Vincent’s front yard is skid row. Her neighbors are the city’s unwanted.

Once a week, the 78-year-old woman leaves her simple bedroom inside the Downtown Women’s Center to walk among the homeless and mentally ill of Los Angeles. She takes careful steps down sunlit sidewalks, purposely ignoring the men who call out to her or ask for money.

It’s not because she’s afraid or indifferent.

She is in search of single women who want help getting off the streets.

Since last Christmas, Vincent and two outreach workers who accompany her have been coming to 5th and Main streets to hand out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, toiletries, bottled water and--an invitation to visit the women’s center.

In her long, summer cotton dress, and with her soft gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, Vincent startles the homeless women who don’t know her. What is a nice, grandmotherly type with a knapsack slung over her slender shoulders doing here? their eyes seem to ask as she approaches them.

” My son once told me, ‘Mom, those people want to be out there,’ and when he said that I was so enraged,” said Vincent. “But after doing this, I sometimes do see that.”

And she sees that in herself too.

Seven years ago, her job as a housekeeper ended and she had no where to live. She could have stayed with a friend in West Los Angeles or with her daughter, but the Simi Valley home was too small.

So she called the Midnight Mission, and they told her about the Downtown Women’s Center, where she could stay in a private bedroom for $175 a month.

“I chose to live here because it was, at the time, the only thing available,” she said.

Her daughter, 36-year-old Rebecca Rosenbauer, said she admires her mother’s independent attitude.

“She’s 78 years old, and she is finally doing something she loves,” said Rosenbauer. “I really have no fear that she lives in downtown, because she’s happy. She does a lot of things and she gets out.”

As she walks down Main Street, Vincent considers each woman she passes carefully.

Because of donations, said Charmayne Guzman, an outreach worker, the women of downtown’s skid row are often dressed well enough to mask their homelessness. Fear for their safety also keeps homeless women from lingering in the obvious places where homeless men gather.

Sometimes, a woman will recognize Vincent and come to her, knowing that the older woman carries food in her knapsack. Other times, the outreach workers will bring along a woman who was formerly homeless, like 42-year-old Virginia Shoals, to lead the way and show them which doorways, parks and alleyways have become hideaways.

The work can be frustrating. Some women do not want help, even free help, because of their dependence on drugs and their devotion to boyfriends who promise them a life of freedom and endless nights of parties, said Shoals.

Shoals, who has lived at the women’s center for almost 10 years, learned about the facility through a friend. Opened in 1986, it provides single, elderly and mentally ill women with a small room.

In the past decade, said outreach coordinators, the female faces of skid row no longer belong to just the drug addicted, mentally ill, or the elderly, but but also to younger women.

The Los Angeles Rescue Mission, for example, has reported a 228% increase from 1995 to 1997 in the number of requests made by homeless single women and children to stay there for the night. The mission currently has 195 beds for them.

As Vincent and the others make their way down 5th Street, she spots a woman seated on the sidewalk next to a few men and asks her if she wants a sandwich.

“I don’t like peanut butter and jelly,” says the woman, who identifies herself as Naomi. But her eyes follow the white lunch bag that outreach worker Cari Guzman begins to take out from her knapsack. Naomi reconsiders the offer. It seems like a perfect time for Vincent and Guzman to give her a laminated lavender card that includes a map and information about the women’s center.

There are no catches, the women tell her, just a place to shower and to rest for a moment. Sandwich bag in hand, Naomi looks at her nails, as if she has been told all of this before.

“OK, OK, I’ll come by,” she says.

As Vincent and the others continue down 5th Street, they spot a tall young woman dressed in an oversized shirt and shorts. She has sweet eyes and a pretty smile and begins dancing to the music that plays on her boyfriend’s radio.

Even as they approach her, she continues to move, as if her body has caught the rhythm of the music and she can’t quite shake it off.

They hand her a bag, and she stops dancing to take a look inside.

“I can’t believe you gave me deodorant!” she says giggling. That’s when the women surround her and give her the laminated card. She smiles shyly, her white, straight teeth are as brilliant as the pearl necklace and earrings Vincent wears.

But she does not seem interested in the center and this does not surprise Vincent, or the other outreach workers.

Opened in 1978 by founder Jill Halverson, the Downtown Women’s Center provides meals, clothing, medical referrals and social programs. It serves at least 80 women a day, said executive director Caroline McColl. But because the facility is located on the outskirts of skid row, many homeless women have not discovered it. That is why the outreach program, and volunteers like Vincent, have become an instrumental link, said McColl.

Vincent said she was surprised by how many women are in need of basic supplies on the street, supplies that could easily be obtained at the center, such as bottled water and sun block.