The fight to reduce homeless service worker burnout in grueling industry

Josh Hoffman sat before a room of aspiring homeless service workers and talked about why it’s important not to get discouraged.

To make his point, the veteran in the field recalled a story of a woman with mental health issues who repeatedly refused to move into a new building because because birds in the neighborhood told her it wasn’t safe.

As a result, she remained on the street, but a couple of years later things changed. Hoffman said his team received a call from another organization saying the woman was now housed and was willing to follow through with the application process because she had already done it several times with them and felt comfortable.

“If we had never gotten that call we would have figured ... our work with her hadn’t really had an impact on her life, but it did,” said Hoffman, now director of homeless services at the Little Tokyo Service Center.

“Planting seeds,” one attendee remarked.

“That’s the perfect analogy,” Hoffman replied.

Helping people get off the street can be a grueling, poorly paid job, one where workers often feel unsafe and lament that they haven’t received enough training on how to help, or an explanation of what to expect, when dealing with people facing some of the worst moments of their lives.

Recent studies have found those factors contribute to widespread burnout and turnover among L.A. County homeless service workers, harming the ability to solve a crisis where thousands sleep on the streets.

Now, a new weeklong fellowship is trying to change that by helping aspiring workers be ready on Day One.

In April, the Los Angeles Unhoused Response Academy, Laura for short, welcomed 15 fellows as part of its second cohort.

Fellows received a stipend to attend and learned about different medicines to reduce side effects of streets drugs and how to use the county’s online system that service workers employ to connect people to housing. They also learned about actions in their personal lives they could take to reduce burnout and toured multiple service providers on Skid Row.

At the Midnight Mission, fellows ate at the cafeteria that feeds hundreds a day, toured a dormitory, a soon-to-open women’s 12-step program and an education center with computers, books and musical instruments. At the end, the mission’s chief communications officer, Georgia Berkovich offered fellows her number.

“You can always call for questions, ideas — whatever,” Berkovich said.

Justin Szlasa, who founded the Laura fellowship, said that it can take months or years for homeless service workers to gain the contacts and knowledge dispensed over the five-day learning program.

By fast-tracking training, the fellowship seeks to educate aspiring workers about what they are getting into and give them the tools to succeed, including a plethora of contacts they can turn to when problems arise.

“You are less likely to burn out if you are embedded in a community and you have peers and a support system,” said Szlasa, the director of homeless initiatives for the Future Communities Institute, which puts on the fellowship.

The first class in October was funded by actor Keanu Reeves, who is a friend of Szlasa’s, with the second bankrolled by the United Way. Szlasa is working to find funding for additional sessions.

Tents on Skid Row.

(William Liang / For The Times)

Meghan D’Zmura, a former server at an upscale Italian restaurant downtown, was in the April group and described the fellowship as a “CliffsNotes master class” on social work that helped her land a job in May as a resident services coordinator at the Weingart Center on Skid Row.

D’Zmura said her experience with homelessness as a child motivated her in the past to volunteer to help unhoused people, but there was also so much she didn’t know before joining the fellowship, including the nuts and bolts of how to navigate a complicated web of agencies and services.

“It will be a very fulfilling, but probably taxing, position,” D’Zmura, 35, said shortly before starting. “But I am prepared.”

One contributing factor to burnout is pay.

According to a 2023 Rand Corp. study, L.A. County homeless service workers on average earn about $40,000 to $60,000 a year, leaving little left after paying for rent and other necessities.

The analysis focused on front-line workers employed by nonprofits who serve as a backbone of L.A. County’s homeless response and connect people with housing, job training, food assistance and medical care.

Nonprofits executives told report authors that they would like to pay more, but the government contracts that fund their work don’t pay enough to allow it.

If pay is lifted that can mean less money for other things like beds, of course.

But Rand economist Lisa Abraham, who co-wrote the report, said higher pay could pay dividends in the homeless sector, citing one study that found that after wages were increased in nursing homes, residents had fewer preventable health conditions and reduced mortality.

“These front-line workers are directly in touch with the homeless population,” Abraham said. “Having a talented, strong workforce that feels supported, that feels motivated to work ... that’s likely to translate into outcomes for their clients.”

Los Angeles city and county officials have taken some steps recently to enable higher pay for at least some workers, but advocates say more is needed.

Szlasa said he hopes training like that in the Laura fellowship can make a difference by creating a strong argument to life pay as workers learn to better help more people.

“The long-term fix for me is more productivity,” said Szlasa, who is also a commissioner for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

Belit Paulissian was among the April fellows. She decided to go into the homeless service industry when her work as a TV producer dried up.

While in line the other month at the the Midnight Mission cafeteria with her fellow students, Paulissian said that if she lands a job in homeless service work she expects to make less than what she was earning when the entertainment industry was healthier, but that she wants to find stability while helping others.

“Hopefully,” she said, “I am going to do this.”

Later that day, Paulissian and others walked a few blocks to the Sidewalk Project’s drop-in center, which caters to unhoused women who use drugs or engage in sex work.

The organization’s executive director, Soma Snakeoil, explained how people can come to the center to receive supplies that help make drug use safer and get help if they experienced sexual violence. Others simply need to rest after staying awake for nights in an attempt to protect themselves from assault.

“I hope you have very successful careers and protect your minds and bodies and give a lot of good back to the community,” she told the fellows.

As the group walked out, Snakeoil urged them to take a box of Narcan, the anti-overdose medication.