Staci Miller & A Better Way to Address Homelessness in LA

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

I'm Cynthia Mark and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail. Welcome to And Now Love. Better Angels is taking a holistic approach to tackling the homelessness epidemic in Los Angeles. This very emotionally charged crisis is being addressed not just with empathy and love, but also with pragmatism. Staci and Adam Miller created Better Angels after realizing that while there are many, many organizations doing good work, the antiquated systems in place and a lack of cohesion make movement slow and real change difficult.

Additionally, most of us in Los Angeles say that homelessness is our biggest issue yet the majority of us do nothing beyond paying our taxes to help address it. As Staci and Adam say, all of us own part of this problem and we must be part of the solution. We are so grateful to have Staci here with us today to talk about the work Better Angels is doing now. The issues faced by the unhoused and what Better Angels is planning for in the future. Hello, and thank you so much. We're honored to have you here. I thank you, Cynthia, so much for having me.

Really appreciate it. It's great. And you're so busy doing what you do. And to take your time out for us today is it means a lot. And I think everyone that's listening in is going to learn so much from what you have to share. So first of all, Better Angels has an existed for very long. Nope. So we, were founded in 2022. So we've been around for about four years prior to launching it, we spent a year and a half kind of looking at the issue of homelessness and what we how we thought we can contribute, what we thought it made sense to do. So we've been looking at this issue really in depth, since kind of late 2020, but officially launched in 2022.

So the we as you and Adam. Yes, yes. And so just amongst yourselves, you're like, wow, this is kind of out of control. Clearly people are trying to help there. We're all desperate. We all want this to be different than it is. Yep. How in the world can we make an impact and how did it become that important to you as there's a moment in your lives or or, you know, just being in Los Angeles and driving through the city and seeing, you know, people living on our streets and what what moved you to consider it so deeply? Yeah, there were a couple of different inflection points.

So I've been involved with transition age foster youth, since probably 2014. And, those are kids who are transitioning out of the foster care system. And those kids, the statistics and the odds they face are very, very difficult. So about 50% of, transition age foster youth will experience some bout of homelessness as they transition out of the system. So I had sort of been exposed to it from that standpoint. For me, one particular inflection point, which is I was driving, our youngest son to school one morning, I was in the right lane, and we were stopped at a light, and, homeless individual with a full shopping cart was in the middle of the street on Pico Boulevard.

And he took his cart and he ran, had like, full force towards the car. And I really thought that he was going to smash into the car at full force. And I felt my heart rate lift up and everything. Fortunately, he veered to the right, right before, he hit our car and I turned around and I said to my son, oh, that was that was so scary. Are you okay? Is everything okay? And he looked at me and he said, next time, make sure you ride in the middle lane. Adam and I realized that for kids and young people, this was just normal. Yeah, there was nothing exceptional about that experience.

And my I think my son was ten years old or something at the time, and his advice was, just don't be riding in the right lane. It wasn't, you know what? This is not okay. We were already kind of looking at focusing on some truly intractable problems in our area. And obviously homelessness is the is the obvious problem to focus on. But I think the fact that and our concern that young people were starting to just grow up where this was, was, was normal, just became really important to us that we not normalize this problem, and we really try to understand it and see if we can make a difference.

And that was sort of the impetus behind Better Angels. Yeah, that's a sort of a fascinating issue here in Los Angeles. You know, you think about how many times you drive by a community of people living in tents and you don't even think anything. And it's it's extremely saddening. Yep. Yeah. I think for when I talk to a lot of people, people even themselves have become so desensitized to it that people will often say that they don't unless they have someone visiting from out of town, and then they see LA through the eyes of a visitor. Then they they pay attention again.

Yes, but even it is so pervasive for all of us. No matter what part of town we live in. And that's also the sad thing. It is the one thing that unites the city across all of our 99 neighborhoods and geographies is that it is, a challenge and a horrendous humanitarian crisis across the entire city that we've all become numb to. Sadly, yes. Yes. And and to that comment about noticing when you have out-of-town guests. I where we live, when my daughter is at home, she's not home anymore. And we we had a dinner party once with relatives that were coming from other parts of California and, and she said, oh, mom, they're going to have to go past the homeless community under the overpass as if all of a sudden we now should be thinking about cleaning that up, you know, to make our guests more comfortable.

Right? Right. What an awkward way to think about it. You know, it's. Yeah, it's that's really troubling to me. Yeah. And I mean, when you think about the Olympics coming. Right, we're going to face that. Yes. As a city. Right. Like, what do we do? Do we cover it up? Right. Because it seems like we will. It's we just have to. We're getting so close now. We just have to desperately put on a pretty face. Exactly right. Which is shameful. Exactly. I think Better Angels is doing some things to help this community in a way that some other agencies aren't able to, and I it correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm feeling like some of what you're attempting to do is to give these other agencies a better platform to work from giving them a better chance at being successful. Yeah. So one of the things so Adam and I kind of come to this work from different professional backgrounds, and I think a lot of other folks who are working in this ecosystem. So Adam comes to it with a technology background and a business background, and, and I come to it from a consulting and business background. And so one of the things that's really important to us in doing all of this work is that we're building things that are in the business term, scalable.

So what does that mean? That means that we're doing things that can be replicated and used across a wider number of people. And so one example on that front is from a technology perspective. So we are creating platforms that make it easier for case managers to provide services to unhoused individuals that make it easier for shelter operators and case managers to connect unhoused individuals with shelter and transitional housing in real time. So those are just some of the examples where we're trying to better enable the ecosystem, because right now, a lot of what happens is very antiquated and very relationship based.

And it's a system that has extremely high turnover, particularly in the case manager area. And so relying on things that are so heavily reliant on those relationships and manual operations makes it a really inefficient system. And so we have people on the streets suffering for a lot longer than they need to be, whether that's shelter beds going unused every night, whether that's housing that's available to folks that take six months to actually get somebody into the housing. So those are just sort of a few ways where we're trying to enable the ecosystem itself.

I have a lot of questions about those things, and I think they're going to come up when you address these five pillars that you've come up with in terms of helping people through the system so that they can actually end up in a place that's safe, called home. Yeah. What are those five pillars? So when we first started Better Angels, we understood that this is a really complicated problem and there is no one solution. And one of the reasons it's so complicated is because there's a different sort of cycle for people in, in how they become unhoused.

And then there's different time frames for solutions. So one of the very first things that we noticed in looking at all the data and talking to people, is that way more people become unhoused every year than show up in the point in time. Homeless count that we do every year. And so no matter what you do on the outplacement, on getting people into affordable housing, if way more people are falling into homelessness to begin with, then it's really hard to get a handle on the problem. So the first pillar is around prevention. So we are trying to prevent people from becoming homeless to begin with.

And our main work that we do there is we have a program called the Step Fund. And that program we actually give either grants or zero interest non punitive loans, depending on people's qualifications to people who are low income. They've already received an eviction notice and they faced a recent financial shock. So if something doesn't change for them then they are likely to become unhoused. And so that Step Fund program is our first program and a really important program. And we've given away about $2 million to to families. And how is that funded generally.

So it's funded through a combination. The foundation itself contributes a lot to, to that funding. We have private donors, we have foundations. And then this coming year, for the first time, the county has set up a new system called La Casa. We're going to be also providing the Step Fund program and prevention services through, some county funding for the first time this year as well. So is La Casa just a so not just but is it a source that's pointing just at funding. So it is a new infrastructure that the county has created to help specifically, allocate some of the, funding that's come in through some of the ballot initiatives that have happened, particularly around prevention in the county, because I think, you know, over the past few years, there has been a greater focus in general, probably throughout the entire state, on this idea that prevention makes a lot more sense.

It's much more cost effective if you can prevent and obviously humane if you can prevent somebody from becoming unhoused to begin with. So basically, what we do is somebody is behind on rent, they're behind on rent because something happened. They had a car repair, they lost their job temporarily, and now they're behind on rent. Our average grant or a loan that we give people is $2,100, and we keep about 96% of them housed for $2,100 or so spending tens of thousands a year as people wind up unhoused. So how does one find out about this resource?

So we have social media and outreach that we do. There. But another big source is partnership. So, we connect with organizations who tend to see people that are becoming vulnerable. This can be faith based organizations. When people start to be food insecure, that's usually a precursor to people potentially being housing insecure. So working with partners like that so people are aware, that this resource exists and people refer clients who they believe are housing vulnerable to our program. I see that is a place where I think one might start to look for assistance is when you're at the place where you've got to go someplace to get some food on the table.

That would be a place where you then might find out about these other services. Exactly, exactly. That's the prevention part, which is fabulous, is the prevention part of it. That must be difficult to apply across the board to the different types of homeless scenarios. There are there are sort of some categories of homelessness that generally apply. Is that right? Yeah. There's a couple of ways that people think about homelessness. So there's what we call chronically homeless. And these are folks who are, you know, have been on the street for long periods of time.

That's about 40% of our unhoused population in LA. So, you know, those folks would not be, you know, applying for for the Step fund. There are people transitioning out of, of different situations who become very vulnerable to being unhoused. So in general, I already spoke about kids in the foster care system. Another big category of folks is people who are, coming out of incarceration. It is often very challenging for those folks to get a job and, get stable housing. So when you think about it, when you secure housing, you generally need a security deposit plus first month's rent.

If you're coming out of incarceration, that can be very challenging. And even though there are some programs for it, and the county and the city do have some program in place for it, it's still wholly inadequate for that need. We have folks coming out of, you know, mental health or addiction treatment programs who, again, are very vulnerable to this situation. And then what we see, if you and you look at the data about 60%, and I think this is a surprising statistic for people, about 60% of people become homeless initially because of a financial shock.

So these are people who are working people, but they are very financially vulnerable and exceedingly expensive and unaffordable city. And as I mentioned, with the stop fund, something happens. One thing happens. You know, it can be as simple. Most of these folks are they don't work jobs that they have vacation time your child sick for a week. You have to take a week off work. Suddenly you know you're at risk for potentially losing your housing. And that is literally at least the initial reason that about 60% of people become unhoused. And that's the population that uses the Snap fund.

And what you see, if you if you don't keep people housed initially, then we see the kind of cascading effects that the city is experiencing right now. And then I think when, you know, one other category, which I think is really important, when we talk about kind of neighborhood response and how people who are housed are experiencing things, I refer to it, I think, as kind of the hidden homeless. So these are folks that you may not know are homeless. They may be sleeping in their cars or RVs. A lot of times they have jobs. They just rent is really, really expensive.

In LA, we have a really high percentage of people who are paying 50, 60, 70% of their income on rent, which, depending upon what kind of job you have, just may be undoable. And I think that people don't view because you don't see them in the same way. You don't realize that they're unhoused. And they're not part of that statistic we get every year. It's this many people are homeless because we've gone out and counted them. Those people aren't being counted. They're harder, you know, to count, depending upon, you know, where, where they're living.

But I think we also, when, when people kind of make determinations about the homeless, that all of them are, you know, drug addicts or mentally ill, I don't think they contemplate this pretty significant percentage of the homeless population that you just don't necessarily see. It in. In Kansas. Yeah. It's surprising that 60% of these people that are unfortunately potentially unhoused just had that one step that took them over the edge. And it's interesting too, that there's so much different information about that. We're kind of in the business here on our podcast of trying to find out some of these things so that we can share them with the public.

And sometimes I hear, oh no, no, that's, you know, that number's inflated. It's really here's. What's interesting, which is that, first of all, people make determinations at different points in time. So the 60% is why somebody initially becomes homeless. If you look overall, in terms of the number of people who are unhoused, you know, about a quarter of them have significant mental health issues, a quarter of them are have addiction issues. And then there's obviously overlap between those two things. But what I think is a really, really important statistic, and it's why I feel like we're kind of in this situation today is the Benioff Center, which is a big homeless initiative at the state of California and at out of, UCSF up in Northern California.

They did a big homeless study last year, and about 40% of homeless people identified that. They began using significantly after they became homeless. So right now, our system in LA prioritizes people who are chronically homeless and people who already have significant drug or mental health issues, which on the one hand makes sense. But the problem is, let's say you became homeless initially because of a financial shock. The data is telling us that if you stay on the streets, you're likely to develop these other issues, and then it becomes much, much harder for you to get off the street.

So I think one of the things that we advocate for and that we're very interested in, is how do you make sure that obviously, you know, we're focused on prevention, but once somebody actually becomes homeless, how do we move closer and more quickly to resolution? Because every day that person stays on the street is a day that it's much more likely that they're going to start developing addiction issues or mental health issues, making it that much harder for them to get off the streets. And that that would occur is not surprising. Yeah. No, I mean, it's I think that there's this, you know, idea that people don't want to get off the streets.

I think that's sort of something I hear a lot too, right? Like they don't want to go into shelters. They don't want to, you know, to to get help. And I think that's another sort of just misunderstanding of the way that the situation works for most people. We were talking with a gentleman, Doctor Feldman, who heads up USC, C Street Medicine. He's taken sort of years to create this fabulous program that he has, and he sends himself out or his team out, and they create relationships with the people who are needing their help, whether they know they need help or not.

And they're not in the business of trying to make today's situation tolerable. First of all, let me help you. You're not healthy. Let me help you. But in order to be allowed in, they've got to create, trust with this person, you know, why would I trust you? You're just showing up here, knocking on my door. My tent. Door, let's say. And he said he's rarely met a person who ultimately did not want his help and want a bed that hardly anyone refuses him, but that what they needed from him first was this this mutual respect and this, you know, sort of a level of trust.

Let me know that what you're providing me is real. Yeah. I mean, to that point, one of the other our other important pillars just getting back to those five pillars is our services pillar. So what we do with the services pillar is we go across the city and the county in different neighborhoods, and we partner with organizations that are already have something in place and a relationship with the unhoused community. So let's say it's a church that's or the Salvation Army that's doing a weekly meal for folks. And we said, okay, well, all of these folks are already coming.

They already have a level of trust with the community. So why don't we try to bring a lot of different service providers at the same time so people aren't just getting a meal. So we work with partners in neighborhoods across the county to bring together different service providers. It's often mobile clinics like you're describing to provide health care. But in addition to that, we do simple things where we partner with shower providers so people can have a clean shower, people providing haircuts, kind of basic things. But then we also try to link people to longer term sustainability.

So we try to see if there's a way that we can help match them to shelter or housing that day, like while they're actually at our partner organization, in that very moment. And, and look, I do think we have to be honest there, there are certain people who are unhoused right now that there are addiction or mental health issues are at a level that, you know, it becomes very difficult to to help them without some more serious interventions. But a lot of our neighbors, you know, to your point, it's they want trust, but they also want to be treated humanely.

So right now, the way our system works, if we're doing a resource day and someone lives in Venice, people create community for themselves. Even if they're unhoused. They have people that are looking out for them. They have friends and so if you say, okay, well, we have a shelter bed, but that shelter bed is in downtown LA or near Skid Row, and this person lives in Venice. It's not surprising if that person says, you know what, I'm going to refuse that shelter bed downtown. Their whole community, their safety net is in Venice. And so I think we kind of dehumanize people and don't take that into consideration.

So, you know, we're just trying to also create the systems from a technology standpoint so that someone can see, okay, what's actually available in Venice. Because if this person knows that there's a safe place for them in the community they already live in, there are much more likely to to accept help than if they're told you need to go 20 miles from here, where you have no community and no safety net. Right? And you know what happens to me tomorrow. Exactly. Yeah. At least here I know my neighbors. We support each other, right? Yeah, I think that's a pretty big deal.

So how how do you organize that? Well, right now, like, surprisingly, the city and the county don't really know exactly how many shelter beds there are where they're all located. There are, you know, there are some big nonprofits that oversee a bunch of the shelters and the shelter beds. But there's also it's pretty fragmented. There are a bunch of smaller entities and organizations that have shelter beds. So one of the things that we're trying to do is just create a shelter or directory where there's clarity on where all of these beds are. We understand certain shelters serve certain communities.

So there are some shelters that are just for that. There are some shelters that are for mothers and young children. So really trying to understand where those where those beds are. And then over time, we're layering in technology that will actually enable caseworkers, together with unhoused neighbors, to kind of do a real time, up to date bed inventory and matching. So the vision is that a caseworker can can go to somebody can can go to that tent and say, you know, okay, I have a bed for you. I know what you need, and I have a bed for you, and I can reserve it for you right now, and I can take you there right now, today.

You can't do that. It is. It takes lots of different phone calls and lots of back and forth. And it's very complicated to to actually try to make that happen today. Is it almost like there'd be an app that you could use? Yes. Yep. No. That is that is the ultimate vision of what we're trying to build. Wow. That's pretty amazing. That would be great. It made me really sad. We were speaking with someone from Safe Place for youth and in Venice, and it seems to me that almost at the end of every day, there was this amount of desperation to be had by a certain hour to get some of these kids and a bed, and for everyone, for the person needing the bed and for the people who are, you know, so emotionally invested in making that happen.

Oh my gosh, that's such a sense of desperation if you can't make it come true. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of that going on. I mean, how do you send people back out to the street when you've been, you know, encouraging them to come to you, you you're going to help them and then you, you can't get through. Yeah. I mean, you know, so two of our pillars, which I already spoke about the services and the prevention, like the people who work on those issues, they're they're dealing with those issues every day. So, you know, the folks who work on the Stop fund, all of the the stories are incredibly, incredibly sad.

You're often, you know, meeting a person when because we interview all the people who, you know, receive the grants and you're meeting them at a time where they're extremely vulnerable and, you know, something challenging is going on in their lives. And there's often a cascading effect, right? Once you become vulnerable, it becomes more and more difficult to kind of get your traction. And then obviously, the services folks are every single week dealing with unhoused individuals. So and by the way, I think safe place for you. It's doing fabulous work.

I yeah, it's just my heart goes out to them in that there are times where they can't. Yeah. No. And they and we work with them and they do do great work I think, you know, is all like we just try to hold the space to recognize that the people working in this space, it's really it's really hard work and it's really emotionally challenging work. And so I think, you know, you try to you try to just focus on the good you are able to do that day and, and support each other as, as a community. And you know, it's not like having an office job, right?

It's the emotional toll of people working in the homelessness sector. Is, is it's really it's really heavy and a lot of folks are are not well compensated and have this incredibly high emotional toll every day. So I think we just have to be honest and create a space for people to, to talk about it and talk about what, what that feels like and just focus on what you did do that day and what you can do that day. You know, because it's it's heartbreaking work for sure. It is. And and we've spoken to several people who have actually said that they went into it thinking they could hear the stories of the people that they're attempting to help, the really traumatic and sad stories, and not where at not, you know, sort of not take it on and kind of have this layer between each other.

But it seems to me that the people we've spoken to who are doing the best work have had to take that layer away and have had to allow themselves to really interact in order to have this mutual trust. And that is so wearing. I mean, I think that somehow we need a support system for the people that are, you know, giving this support from the bottom of their hearts. And, and, you know, now, I think you're right, wearing someone else's trauma, too. Yeah. I mean, and this is like a very obvious metaphor, but I, the the woman who runs our services pillar, the story always resonates with me.

We were, at, Resource Day in Culver City. There was a forecast that it was supposed to pour over the weekend. And this woman came to the resource day. She was clearly suffering from some sort of distress, and she didn't have any shoes on. We asked her it was a church, and the church had some shoes, but they didn't have anything that was close to her size. And the woman who runs our services day, you know, looked at her and said, what size are you? The woman said, I'm a size eight. And the woman, right. She runs to her car and she comes back and she has flip flops on her feet, and she hands the unhoused woman her shoes.

And then as I was pulling away, about an hour later, I saw the unhoused woman, you know, walking down the street in the tennis shoes. And sure enough, there were horrible rains that that whole weekend. And so that woman would have been barefoot, you know, in, in rain. So literally, our person who was running this took on, you know, that that that burden. And to your point, I mean, I think it's very trying, but you you need people who have that heart for that work. I will say that, you know, one of the things that we're trying to do is sort of have that heart, but also combine it with systems and processes that try to impact the entire system at the same time.

And so I think we're understanding that you need to have space to hold the individual stories, but at the same time, you need to move forward on the bigger programs that we're trying to create and the processes and the technology we're trying to bring. Because on the one hand, this gets solved a person at a time, but on the other hand, it has to be solved systemically or it doesn't get solved. True. So. Well, I think, you know, we say here that we can make our best intellectual decisions when we really understand what we're doing emotionally, when and when we really pay respect to that.

First, what am I feeling? You know, what is my heart? Tell me, what do I know to be true? And once I understand that, once I get what this feeling state is, my intellectual decision is going to come from my most loving place. So and you're just describing that, you're saying we, you know, we recognize the horrible upset the the emotional trauma, the unique situations. This has to be made better. And now that we, you know, honestly, look at this honestly, we feel it as individuals. How do we treat it? You know, where do we bring our pragmatism in to support what we know is emotionally right?

It's a really it's such an interesting point because I do want to like, acknowledge something which is around community apathy, around this issue and connect it to what you just said. Because if you ask any Angeleno, what is the biggest problem in the city, you will universally get that the unhoused problem is is the biggest problem. And yet, to your point, a lot of people don't really do anything about it. They complain about it. And I think a big part of it, to your point about emotionally, what do we feel? And then therefore how do we act? People are afraid.

I think the bottom line is that people in their own communities are afraid. They're afraid when they encounter homeless individuals on the street, particularly again, like we talked about, the people who are chronically homeless are oftentimes the ones who may have severe mental health or addiction issues if people feel unsafe and afraid, and that's their emotional response, it's hard to get them to intellectually engage or to be aware that there are, you know, other folks who are unhoused and suffering, that maybe aren't the people on on the streets that you're seeing visually.

And I think we have to hold space for that, because I think there's a lot of judgment of folks, why aren't you doing more? Why do you have these stereotypes of the unhoused? And I think just most of it comes from fear. And some of that fear is understandable. Yes. So I think, you know, we have to hold space for that. And I do think it's a big reason why people don't do more in their own communities. About this issue and engage more. Even though our issue is amongst us and we're thinking about it every day, at some point, it's still alien. Yeah, and there's some safety and keeping it that way.

I understand that there are many, many situations where if you were to approach someone in the who's living on street who's could become violent, you're it's not a good idea to do that. But maybe it's a good idea to start thinking about that person as a person, that person who didn't start out like that, who came from goodness. And and if you can get back to knowing that everyone basically came from goodness, maybe there would be a little more compassion or empathy. And I'm probably sounding really judgy right now, but I think we can all take a deep breath if we can start to look at each other and with some amount of goodness.

I for sure agree. And I think that one of the approaches that we've taken that I think unlocks a little bit for people is that we're we're very focused at the neighborhood and the community level. So it's it can be challenging in such a big city and such a dispersed city to sort of care or engage overall in this. But one of the things we try to do it the services days is there in neighborhoods. So you're coming together with your neighbors and having a responsibility for this issue. And and this is very counter. It can be very counter intuitive.

Our services days. And again the woman who runs it, they're meant to feel like little block parties. It's not all just doom and gloom. And this is horrible and and overwhelming. It's meant to be neighbors coming together with neighbors. And I think bringing like that spirit and sentiment and, you know, a lot of Angelina's feel disconnected to one another and even to their own communities. And so trying to again, it can be counterintuitive, like, what if we actually engage in our most challenging issue in a way that connects people to their own neighborhoods and their own communities?

And again, to your point, provides the support for other people who are interested in engaging this. It unlocks a different way for people to to try to help. And so that's one of the things we're really focused on is, is that neighborhood level engagement in this issue? I think that's fabulous. And I see it in my own neighborhood a block away. You've been there. It is sort of like a block party that's set up in the church parking lot around the corner, and there's all kinds of services there, and the neighborhood is supporting it. But I've been surprised to go and see them set up there.

How does one, as a member of a community, find out about that aspect in terms of being able to do something in one's own neighborhood? Yeah. So I mean, for instance, Better Angels, we, we list all of our events on, on our web site so people can search by their own neighborhood and area and see what's coming up. They can sign up to volunteer and then they'll get alerts in their community. But, you know, in general, usually faith based organizations are a great place to start if people are looking, you know, to, to get involved. Beyond that, there are there are so many nonprofits doing great and really important work in this space, one one individual at a time, definitely.

But it's so amazing how many of you have come to light to all of us here working. Yeah, I had no idea that there were so many people in this city doing so many good things and trying to do so many good things, and there is so many challenges. And you sort of oftentimes a a negative outlook on what is being done versus what should be done. And, you know, we still have so many different ideas and and it's discombobulated. But really there are so many people who are trying to do good work. And it's it's just been like the happiest surprise to see that that's happening in this city and in all cities, I'm sure.

Yeah. I mean, I think like the number we we hear and talk about is that there's more than 10,000 people in the city from just an employment perspective, let alone like volunteer. Yeah. Who are, you know, actively involved in this space and, and trying to make a difference. Like we have really big systemic and governmental challenges and funding challenges and how we allocate funding, you know, to this issue. And it's not getting easier. It is not getting easier. But to your point, like the heart of the people who are involved on the front lines of this issue is what's going to ultimately make the most difference and difference in the lives of of each person and trying to get them off the streets.

Yeah. So tell us about your other pillars. So, we talked about prevention and services. Then technology kind of underlies all of this. So even our prevention pillar, it's kind of an end to end system. So we make it really easy because of our technology layer for people to apply and get funding very quickly. Because one of the things that we see is once you receive an eviction notice, you usually have 7 to 10 days before you're on the street. So you have to intervene immediately. And so our technology system allows us to intervene, verify, validate, interview people and fund them extremely quickly.

And in the period of time in a 7 to 10 day. Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. And then the technology underlies, as I said, our, our shelter work as well as our, our services work. And so, you know, we have a shelter app, for instance, where case managers, when they're going out, seeing clients on the street, they can look at kind of like a geo located thing and see, okay, well, because obviously you're not visiting someone's house. So where you saw them last time is not necessarily where they are at this time. It'll literally show you these are the ten locations this person has been before.

So you know where to go reach them. You can automatically put in the app notes services this person needs. You know kind of a really easy way to to manage things. So technology underlies everything we do. So that's the fourth pillar. And then the fifth pillar is housing. So we are actually building affordable housing. And we are doing it at a third of the time and a third of the cost that the city's doing it. And we're doing it using private developer. So we're not using public funding to build this, which is part of the reason that we're able to do it, you know, more, more quickly and effectively.

And the reality, the housing issue is what underlies all of this, right? L.A. does not have enough housing. Yes. And by the way, it doesn't have enough affordable housing. It doesn't have enough workforce housing. It doesn't have enough market rate housing. And when you don't have enough housing across the board, it squeezes things for the affordable housing in general. And the problem is that, you know, even on the affordable housing front, we're building way too expensive and way too slowly. And so if you don't unlock that piece again, it becomes very difficult to really help get get a handle on this problem.

The affordable housing is way too expensive to build. Yes, and is taking too long. Yep yep yep. So I think the latest numbers are that it takes about $800,000 to build an affordable housing unit. And and what do you see it costing in your program. So we try to do things that are under 300, often under 250 or 200. Oh my god. And again, that's where technology comes into play, where, you know, we work with again partners who are doing this work where we're using, you know, modular housing, new fabrication techniques, things like that, to try to deliver things much more cost effectively.

Is so is that improved because you are looking at the private sector and you're looking at people who are knowledgeable in a given arena. Yeah, it's it's a lot for that reason. And it's also you know, part of the so a lot of developers have left la. La has become such a challenging place to build and developing that a lot of people are leaving. And one of the other reasons that they're leaving is that the city is very unpredictable in terms of how long it takes to actually build a unit. And so by bringing private folks in, we are able to to create a lot more predictability in what we're building and control the time frame a lot more, which makes it cheaper and gets it to market quicker.

So what about it is enticing? If a lot of developers have felt forced to leave the city, how are you engaged in? One of the things that's interesting about affordable housing is that a lot of the actual rent for folks, the government does participate in making sure that that rent gets paid. So if you can say to a developer, okay, we can for sure do this at this cost in three year time frame, and you can be rest assured that rent is actually going to get paid. Then it's you can guarantee better returns for people. So that's you know, that's how we're we're trying to do it versus today.

A lot of our affordable housing today is managed and overseen by homelessness nonprofit who don't have an inherent kind of, you know, expertise in this and or, quite frankly, their hands are tied in a lot of ways in terms of how quickly they can build and the way they can build, because all the money is coming from public financing. Right? Right. So it's not their doing. It's the circumstances. Yeah. A lot of times yeah. It's yeah, it's both expertise and circumstances that are are preventing things. So what you'll see. You know again if you go from prevention to building more housing, you know, we're kind of along a continuum here and we're along a continuum of timing.

Right. So the prevention, it's like, okay, let's help people today in the next 7 to 10 days, obviously building housing, even if you're doing it much more quickly, takes several years to do. But, you know, look at that homelessness. Right. If you I'm using business terminology here, but it's a funnel, right. You have to stop the number of people coming in at the top and you have to provide safe housing for them in order for for them to actually exit this horrible system that they're in. And so Better Angels is trying to, you know, do things all along this, this process to, to try to really deal with this problem at scale.

That's the thing, right? You know, in a city like L.A., we're never going to get to zero. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily realistic, but we have more than 70,000 unhoused people in our city. And two thirds of them are unsheltered, meaning they're literally living on the streets. They're not going to shelters. They're actually on the streets. And in order to make a significant impact on that so that it's livable for everybody and obviously way more humane for the people. You need systemic change. So no matter what we're doing on a 1 to 1 level, we need that to be coupled with systemic change, which is what we're attempting to do about our angels.

And you have quite a staff of people set up doing all of this work to are those people, experts and given fields given. Yeah. So one of the things that was really important to us is that everybody was coming to it from both a understanding of the vulnerable community that we're serving, but also having a particular skill set that they were actually bringing expertise. So for instance, we have a technology team. They're actually engineers, they're trained as software engineers. It's very unusual in this ecosystem because guess what? It's hard to attract software engineers.

I can. Imagine, to the homelessness sector. And but if you are trying to build apps and you're trying to build things that actually work, that meet people's expectations of how things should work, you need software engineers. You can't have people who are kind of just learning, you know, on the side how to do this for the startup fund. So all of our folks are coming from a trauma informed background, but they also have client service background or budgeting background. And so we're kind of trying to marry two different skill sets, you know, with people and having the expertise in each one of those pillars, which I think having both is really important because typically what happens is that people will go into the nonprofit sector and their background is solely, you know, in that sector, and they're not necessarily pulling from from other skill sets.

And I think what we're trying to do is we're trying to bring all of our learnings from the business world and apply it to this space, but in a way that is, you know, obviously respectful of, of the trauma that that people have gone through and are continuing to go through. Are there other agencies that are attempting to do this the way you are? I think that there's definitely, you know, people who are dealing with pieces of of this issue in a way where they're trying to be more systemic. There are definitely people on the housing side that are trying to to build more innovative housing.

I think this kind of holistic approach is, is unusual. And I do think that a lot of entities and organizations are focused on the 1 to 1 relationship, which is so important. And, and we partner with many of those organizations, too, as you said at the beginning, to kind of help facilitate the work they're doing and allow them and give them the support and the infrastructure they need to do that work more effectively. But this kind of system change, you know, I'm particularly in LA, there are other. One of the things when we first started is we looked kind of across the country and across the world to see best practices and kind of pull in the best ideas.

So I think there are other cities and other places where people are trying to do innovative things as well, but this really kind of end to end systemic approach in LA, we feel is pretty unique. I think. So too. Where did you find some good examples around the world? Well, it's interesting, like the step fund itself. So I and Adam had always been very interested in like Microfinancing and how that helps communities, particularly in Africa and parts of Asia and South America. But we were looking we were curious, you know, has it ever been applied to this, you know, this community?

And we actually found some some programs in England where microfinancing around, keeping people housed was, was something that, you know, had had taken off. So we've seen that there are also some programs in the Bay area that we, we looked at for both services as well as for the startup fund. Austin, Texas has some interesting programs. And even, you know, major cities like New York, there are certain things that they do better than we do, here. So really kind of not having pride of ownership and really looking, you know, across the the world for these programs.

One of the things though with LA is our scale is so much bigger. It's vast than any other place. So it's both in terms of like the actual numbers but obviously the geography. So even when you're looking at stuff, you have to see, okay, this worked in Austin because Austin's a much smaller city. So but that doesn't mean there aren't, you know, components of things in other cities that we can't learn from and, and apply here and kind of have that continuous learning. Correct me if I'm wrong, but San Francisco seems to have made some headway in San Francisco.

If, you know, are they actually helping unhoused people become housed or are they moving them around? San Francisco has, you know, a relatively new mayor and Daniel Laurie, who, you know, he's made a lot of systemic changes that I think we're seeing having an impact. So he's made a lot of changing changes on, like the permitting side, for instance, making it easier to build affordable housing. The communities around San Francisco have some really interesting prevention programs. San Jose, for instance, and some of the Valley communities up in Northern California have, you know, have had some really good success at, at prevention.

They're doing a lot more with public private partnerships. So really trying to utilize Silicon Valley and some of the big tech companies to to be innovative and trying to get people off the streets and the other things that they've done look so much is intertwined in, in homelessness and sort of the, the life of a city. So one of the other things that San Francisco has done is they've been successful in bringing business back to their downtown area. Yes. And that has created opportunities, help get unhoused neighbors off the streets, but also just create, you know, a better sense of safety for everybody in the community.

Everything's interrelated. You know, we la the fire department and the police department spend about 50% of their time dealing with unhoused issues. Everything's interrelated, I'm sure is. And so I think San Francisco has really seen that Interrelatedness and is is getting a better handle than LA is right now on those things. That's a really good thing to keep in mind that it is interrelated. And then that can also bring it back to us as individuals. Yeah. No, what I mean, a lot of us are we hear stories all the time where, you know, people are interact ING with their unhoused neighbors in a way that, you know, maybe feels not great to them.

And then if the police are called, police will say, okay, well, do you want us? You know, are you going to press charges against this person? And usually the neighbor says, no, of course I'm not present. You know, I don't want to press charges. Then people are left with no, no good alternatives. There's a lot that's broken. But I do still think not just in the hearts of the people working, you know, directly with the unhoused neighbors. But I see time and again that people want to lean into this issue, but they're afraid and they don't know how.

And and and what to do. And to your point, I think always keeping in mind, you know, other people's humanity, no one, nobody makes a choice to be a drug addict or to have mental health or to live on the streets full time. Nobody is making that conscious choice. Somebody may find themselves so far down a path that it seems like they're making a choice. Nobody wishes this for themselves or for their child. And that's what I think is really important to to keep in mind as we're approaching this issue every day. For sure, such a good way to look at it.

Nobody strove to do this thing. How do you keep doing this every day? You yourself, how do you you get up in the morning and you work on this? It's it's fantastic. It's mind boggling. And you have a family. Yep. How do you incorporate. Yeah. I mean, look, I think it just for me it just goes back to my kids and what I want LA to be. You know, I'm not a native Angeleno, but I've lived here for 25 years. And even in the time that I've lived here, I've seen the city change so much. And I want this to be a city. And I mean this symbolically. I mean, I mean it actually and symbolically.

I want this to be a city that my children want to come back and live in once they're, you know, fully grown and raising their, their own families. And I want this to be a place where we all feel like this is a city where people have a fair shot. And right now it really it all over the city feels very post-apocalyptic in a lot of cases. And so I'm just motivated by wanting the city to be like the city was never perfect. There are issues across the city in this issue in particular. There are a lot of equity issues, right? We know that homelessness disproportion affects communities of color and other folks in, in in different ways.

So nothing, nothing is ever perfect. But I'm fighting for like my kids and for what? What I think this city can and should be. And I do think it's a little bit, you know, again, like I approach this, I have I have a business mindset and a lot of this and I know that traction can be made if we approach it differently. So I think that the fact that, you know, we're we're kind of looking at this a different way gives me hope that we can have some of this systemic change actually happen. And I feel like we have no choice. Like that's the other thing.

We can't kind of continue to go the way we've been going. And so I really don't feel like I don't feel like any of us have a choice. But I think particularly if you're working in this space, you really just don't have a choice but to kind of keep moving forward on it. Yeah, it's a absolute problem and we don't have a choice. It's it's only getting worse and worse. So yeah. I appreciate that you are taking this pragmatic approach in addition to coming from your heart, and you're thinking about your kids and creating a space for them that is different than what we have now.

So in your organization and all the work that you're doing, where do you where do you see love? Is it in the connection that you're making with the unhoused? Is it in and amongst yourselves? Is it as you say, in the neighborhoods that you're affecting in terms of helping them know what's going on? Yeah, I mean, you know, we do with the stop Fund. We do testimonials. So we ask people to kind of record their their stories and share it with us. And I work with the team like the Stop Fund team. And we kind of go over every app, all the applications who qualify every week and, you know, decide on the grants and kind of hear people's stories.

And so I think the, the, the connection for me comes from hearing, hearing those stories. And oftentimes and I think this is where it's eye opening, you know, people who will apply for the Step fund and qualify. They work in our schools. A lot of them work in the homeless services sector. They they work in health care. They're they're community members. They're not they're not some scary unknown kind of situation. And you see that one thing happens that cascades for people. If you so much of our city is living paycheck to paycheck, and it can and it's often that it's often my car broke down, I need it.

I had an $800 repair. And then that started spiraling for me. And most people are they're trying so hard, you know, to to kind of keep their heads above water. And I think the, the connection when you hear those stories, you see how just one circumstance can kind of, you know, turn it for people. And I think that, you know, sharing those stories with our team because, again, because we're being holistic, we're seeing people write the stuff on, is seeing people that are still housed that are at risk for becoming unhoused versus the services days we're dealing with folks who are, you know, currently unhoused.

So we're dealing with with different people who are at different points in their journey. And we're obviously trying to make sure that as many people as possible who are still in their homes can, can stay there. And sometimes, you know, people will have lived in their house for 20 years and, you know, they're really at risk right now. And then we, you know, we also see it from the landlord side of things. You know, some landlords are unwilling to kind of, you know, work and help. But oftentimes the landlords have relationships with with the folks that that live in their buildings or their homes.

And, you know, they're trying to be understanding because it's hard on landlords, too, right? You know, a lot of times landlords aren't big, always big corporate behemoths. Oftentimes it's no, you have you may have a unit or two that that you have. And a lot of times the landlords are willing to to work and try to help their, their tenants stay housed. So and think of them as, as individuals and people. I would think more often than not. Yeah. I mean, they they usually are, you know, sometimes people are like chronically, you know, late on their rent.

And so they're, they're less willing to help then. But when, when people just have, you know, individual shocks, it's, you know, it's very telling. One of the things that I think was most moving for all of us is after the, the fires happened, you know, it dawned upon us very quickly while the fires were still burning, that if you are already low income in Altadena and Palisades, this was going to be catastrophic for you, and you were very likely to become unhoused as, as, as part of this journey. So we started a using the technology that we already had for the Stop fund.

We started a fire grant recovery program for people who, you know, who who lost everything in the fire. And, you know, most of these people because they were already low income, you know, they they didn't have any insurance. They lost all of their belongings. Many of them, particularly in Altadena, their jobs were impacted. And so we were able to kind of provide emergency assistance to them and then months later, help them get security deposits to get into to new housing. And those stories like, we're really, really, we're really telling because people were hustling, they were doing whatever they could, even though they lost everything to, again, keep there, you know, like, we're a city that's treading water and and, you know, that feeling is palpable.

I think that the difficulty in this work is like, you can feel like you're just keeping people little bit their heads above water, which is so important. But we want that's not that's not an okay place. That's not an acceptable place to be. We're trying to get people where they're like on that life raft going to shore, not just their heads a little bit above water. Right? Right. I think it was also Doctor Feldman who was speaking about it in a similar way in that, you know, here's a ship full of people and they're it's for whatever reason, some people have had to jump in there holding on to a log, and that's life, you know, and then something, you can't take the log away from them because that's all they have.

And but but we need more than the log. We need the ship. We need the community. You know, it's it's a really complicated problem. It's a really complicated problem. That can be looked at differently. I think that, like, people give up hope because the only thing community wise that we're asked to do is we're asked to just pay more for the system. And so people give up hope because they say, okay, I keep agreeing to pay more, but it feels like things aren't getting better. And so and in all honesty, that was part of the conceit for starting Better Angels.

Like, you know, over the past ten years, we spent $10 billion for it to feel like things were getting worse. And so I think if people think that there's a chance that it can be looked at in a different way and addressed in a different way, then maybe they'll be more, more hopeful. And I do think people will be more willing to engage if they think. I think people have lost hope that it can get better and so if you don't think it can get better, then you kind of it's easier to just again, going back to your emotional point, it's easier to just pretend it's not there.

Yes. So we have to give people hope that this can get better. And just doing what we've always done is not a way to make people hopeful. It sure isn't. And I really think that what you've got going on, the systems you have in place, would instill that kind of hope for many of us. So how do people know about you? Where do we go to find out more about you? How do we help fund you? Yeah. Oh, well, nobody's asked me that question, so, Yeah. You know, so, obviously you know, we're, Better Angels. LA people can kind of go to the website c learn more about us, they can sign up to volunteer, you know, in our different things, obviously.

Donate on our social media. You know, we try to really tell the stories, you know, a lot of our resources that our services team does are on there. And, again, in, in the community, I think like one of the things when we started Better Angels is this has to be like everybody in their own neighborhoods joining on board in order. That's another way you make systemic change, right? It's not it's not by just having last year I think we had 1000 volunteers. We need tens of thousands of people in their own communities. So we just really encourage people to to go and sign up to do something in your own neighborhood.

Then the barrier for you doing something you know is, is super low. The other thing we encourage people to do is volunteer in groups, volunteer with people from work, volunteer with people from your child's school, in your own community. And we kind of create opportunities for for people to do that because this, this, these an army of people. It does so. But is that opportunity also presented on your website? Yep, yep. All of that information, is there. We're in credibly focused on volunteers trying to make it as easy as possible and people, easily aware of what's going on again, at their own neighborhoods.

We're not asking you to if you live in in the South Bay, we're not asking you to go to downtown L.A. to volunteer. We're really trying to have this be, a grassroots feeling in people's own neighborhoods and all of that. You know, you can find on our on our social media and on our website all of those opportunities. Right. And to your point, like, you know, we're in order to kind of continue to fund our prevention work, our services work, the technology infrastructure, you know, that to make it scalable, that's the thing, to make it scalable, it requires funding.

So we're always appreciative of that as well. Good. Well, we're happy to bring you to light as much as we possibly can. We want our citizens here in Los Angeles and in other parts of the world, of course, to sort of see these good examples of people caring for each other. And thank you so much for doing what you do. We don't get paid to promote any of this. We just want to promote people and organizations that are coming from love. No. And we very much appreciate the opportunity to kind of talk about it and, you know, explain what we're doing and why.

And, just shine a little light on some of those individual stories. So thank you so much for for giving us that chance. Oh, it's our pleasure. And you said shine a little light, which reminds me of your wonderful phrase of shine up your halo. Yes. I love that. Yes. So we can all shine up our halos. It's not too hard to do. Yeah. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having us. Please follow, rate and share our podcast and pass this episode along to someone who might need it. This is. And now love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart.

Thank you.