August 1
A mile north of Skid Row is Olvera Plaza/Olvera Street. Olvera Plaza is the birthplace of the City of Los Angeles. Olvera Plaza and Street is one of the major tourist spots in Los Angeles.
One of the historic churches in Olvera Plaza is La Plaza United Methodist Church. In the church basement is a separate non profit, the Museum of Social Justice. The current exhibit is Hope and Dignity: the Farmworker Movement. This photography exhibit of the early years of the movement seeks to capture the reality of it as both a union struggle and a civil rights struggle.
Two Skid Row Action Plan meetings not led by the County but with County participation have happened in the Museum of Social Justice. One took place in mid-May after Implementing The Skid Row Action Plan came out. The focus was on the Economic and Community Development section of the Plan. The name of the gathering was Living Wage, a phrase from the 1908 Methodist Social Creed.
The fourteen people who attended it were a cross section of Methodist leaders, County officials, and Skid Row folks who were connected to the Plan. Rev. Jennifer Gutierrez, Executive Director of CLUE (Clergy Laity United for Economic Justice) attended the gathering. CLUE is well known in Los Angeles social justice circles.
Walk The Talk is a day long Skid Row community parade with street theater that honors eight community leaders, mostly at the grassroots level, selected through a nomination and voting process. It happens every two years and was set to happen the end of May.
The main thing that happened during Living Wage was a performance of 75% of the Linda Leigh script. The eight honorees do a two hour or so videotaped interview and the street theater performance works with a transcript of the interview to create a 12 to 15 minute long performance that is 90% or more word for word from their interview.
We did Linda’s script because in it she speaks about the Skid Row Action Plan process. Linda was one of the main people who worked on the Economic and Community Development section of the Plan from a Skid Row residential perspective.
Part of the national structure of the United Methodist Church is the California Pacific Conference which covers Central and Southern California along with Hawaii. Within that structure are several departments which offer services to local Methodist churches and others. One of them is called Justice and Compassion.
Rev. Dr. Denyse Barnes is the Director of Justice and Compassion and she also attended the Living Wage gathering.
Here is a Letter of Solidarity that I wrote with her and was sent out in September 2022, soon after the Skid Row Action Plan community-based planning process began…
September 2022
cc: Daniella Urbina and Skid Row Residents Advisory Committee
Dear Dr. Alisa Orduna, Sieglinde Von Deffner, and Anthony Ruffin,
This Letter of Solidarity to you from Rev. Denyse Barnes, Director of Justice and Compassion Ministries for the California Pacific Conference of the United Methodist Church, is based on the Skid Row Action Plan being created over the next six months, specifically Item Seven in the June 28 Motion. Along with the five Prioritized Components, Item Seven was presented in the August 10th Kick Off meeting as an Additional Component — Increased Sources of Income: Identify strategies to increase ongoing access to public benefits and community financial service options as well as education and employment opportunities
During the Kick Off meeting, County Supervisor Hilda Solis mentioned Jobs, Job Training, Education, and Foundation/Philanthropic efforts as examples of Increased Income sources. The purpose of this Letter is to highlight another possible Income Source that aligns with the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the original Poor People’s Campaign in 1967–68.
Dr. King spoke about the need for a guaranteed income to help lift folks out of poverty. Today, that is often expressed by the phrase Basic Universal Income. Stockton, California is an example of a city in the midst of a Basic Universal Income program.
Innovations around guaranteed income are not foreign to Los Angeles County. From LA Weekly March 2022: “Los Angeles County launched its $1,000 guaranteed basic income program, Thursday, with eligible residents able to apply through the “Breathe” website. The “poverty alleviation program” would provide $1,000 per month over a 3-year span, but will only go to 1,000 randomly-selected applicants. The pilot program will be studied over the following three years, to see its economic effects on participants.”
We believe the Skid Row Action Plan process should examine guaranteed income becoming part of your Additional Component of Increased Sources of Income for Skid Row Residents, especially in light of public attention being shown Reparations through the work of the California Reparations Task Force.
We are excited about your effort over these next months and beyond.
In Solidarity,
Rev. Denyse Barnes
The Living Wage gathering in mid-May was followed in mid-June by an annual four day long California Pacific conference and this year it took place within walking distance of the Burbank Airport. Several hundred people, mostly local church leaders, attended it. I was now the Chair of the Hunger and Homelessness Strategy Group within Justice and Compassion and the focus was the Skid Row Action Plan.
One of the many issues that always comes up in any Skid Row community-based planning process is the need to increase access to healthy food. Over the course of the four days in Burbank emerged a theme of churches organizing inter-generational community gardens inclusive of the homeless population. A Skid Row Action Plan gathering is now being organized by Rev. Denyse to happen on October 26th.
With the Rev. Denyse letter from September 2022 mentioning the Basic Income work of Dr. King and the Poor People’s Campaign, one of the County Action Plan facilitators suggested I reach out to the Los Angeles branch of the Poor People’s Campaign: a national call for moral revival. I did and I was told that Basic Income is an important issue for them, but in terms of leadership and focus, their priority right now is mobilizing the vote around the November elections.
The personal pastor for Kamala Harris is Amos Brown with Third Baptist Church in the Bay Area. Rev. Brown has been a major member of the California Reparations Task Force. Just as the statewide California Reparations Task Force has done enormous work over the past few years, a Los Angeles expression of it has been very active now for many months. Led by the L.A. Civil Rights Department with their Reparations Advisory Commission, a 56 page Executive Summary was sent out on September 4th. There will now be follow up community meetings in Council Districts 8, 9, 10.
During the August 1st meeting, a main agenda item was to look at a policy paper that had come out a few months earlier that got covered by the LA Times titled Basic Income To Reduce Homelessness In LA. One of the four authors is Gary Blaisi from UCLA.
A few years ago, Gary Blaisi was one of the honorees for Walk The Talk and so we did a reading of a section of his script where he talked about his legal experiences many years ago in dealing with the County to increase the amount of income provided through General Relief (GR).
From an address titled Flourishing in the Midst of Trauma by Methodist leader Dr. Frank Rodgers, co-director of the Center for Engaged Compassion:
“The real God is a God of infinite compassion that is a spiritual resource for us in trauma in ways that are profoundly reparative and restoring. For me, my insight into this is from a Holocaust theologian, Melissa Raphael, who wrote a book called The Feminine Face of God in Auschwitz. And she was dialoguing with all of these theologians who were trying to explain why God allowed Auschwitz to happen, that could have done something but God choose not to because God had bigger designs that we just had to understand and when God wants to, God can kind of intervene in history and change things, but since God isn’t, there is some greater plan that we have to learn how to trust. And Melissa Rapheal said, that God understanding resembles Hitler alot more than it resembles any benevolent reality in our world. That god needs to die in our religious imagination. But she said there is another sacred essence that was in Auschwitz. It’s the feminine face of God and for her Jewish tradition she calls it Shekinah. Shekinah is that divine reality that goes with God’s people into exile. That enters into suffering with them, who is a companion, who could sit with us in our despair, who can be a presence that gets us, that understands, that doesn’t have the power to stop bad things from happening, but does have the presence of compassion, that can be a companion that keeps our own spirit alive. It can resuscitate that pilot light within us. And the miracle of Auschwitz is that feminine divine presence was being embodied in the women. The women in those circumstances should have had their spirits squashed and completely destroyed, instead found it within them to wash each other’s faces, to massage each other’s hands, to pick lice from each other’s hair, to hold crying babies, to tend to those who were dying, even to adorn themselves in daily rituals of hygiene claiming their own dignity, their own beauty in the midst of forces that was trying to dehumanize them. That is a power that can restore the human spirit. That is a power that companions us in the midst of trauma.”