Arise, Shine

Isaiah is one of the major prophets in the Old Testament. The Book of Isaiah was written around the 7th Century BC.

There are three sentences (verses) in Isaiah chapter 60 that I believe are speaking to Skid Row today. They are verse one, eleven, and twenty-two. The numbers eleven and twenty-two are important because in Biblical use of numbers, eleven represents transition.

Isaiah chapter 60. verse one…Arise, shine, for your light has come and the Glory of the Lord rises upon you. verse eleven…Your gates will always stand open, they well never shut, day or night, so that men may bring you the wealth of the nations — then Kings led in triumphal procession. verse twenty-two…The least of you will become a thousand, the smallest a mighty nation. I am the Lord; in it’s time I will do this swiftly.

A phrase we might use today to describe these words of Isaiah is “systemic change”.

There are some encouraging signs that changes in systems are happening in Skid Row.

Four years ago I saw online a news article by the USC Journalism school saying the County Board of Supervisors just released to LAHSA five million dollars in emergency funds for Skid Row at the street level. LAHSA stands for Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

I went to the Downtown Area Director for Councilmember Jose Huizar, in essence the Skid Row point person for City Council, and asked her if she knew about this five million dollars. She said no. I said LAHSA is a joint City and County agency and so how could five million dollars in emergency money for Skid Row at the street level be released without you knowing about it? She said Jose Huizar’s office and LAHSA do not have much of a relationship. This is called extremely top down.

But now four years later, Mayor Garcetti’s office has a new person, and position, called the Director of Skid Row Strategies. And 20 million dollars in emergency Skid Row funds at the street level have been released from the state. Everyone in Skid Row knows about it and numerous groups have been doing mini-community input sessions to strategically work with City Hall on how the money will be spent.

And so it’s not that the residents of Skid Row don’t have a voice. They have a voice. They need their voice to be heard, their actions seen, their lives respected.

The new LAHSA Homeless Count numbers came out June 4 showing a 16% increase in homelessness in the City.

My Native American name is Woorypot Moompet.

Here is the Public Comment I read at the June 5 meeting of the Homelessness and Poverty committee meeting for the Agenda Item of looking at these new LAHSA numbers:

“Tom Grode, part of the Skid Row Community Improvement Coalition, and some of us interacted with you recently because of the Skid Row Community Refresh Spot. (I held up a report) This is the “Understanding Native American Homelessness in Los Angeles County” report by the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission released March 2019. And so I’m approaching these new LAHSA numbers based on Indian Alley in Skid Row, one of the most well known Native urban locations in the country. What this report shows, and what these LAHSA numbers confirm, is the need for systemic change. Councilmember O’Farrell, I’ll be contacting Star in your office about this since she is the person we dealt with before.”

Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell is the Chair of the Homelessness and Poverty Committee. He is a member of the Wyandotte Nation.