I wrote two blog articles about the Skid Row Action Plan and the Resident Advisory Committee (RAC), one dated January 25 and one dated March 18. This will be my first since then, close to five months ago.
Dr. Alisa Orduna is still facilitating but now as part of a California consulting firm called Change Well Project. Their mission: “Transforming social service systems, supporting thriving communities. We partner with communities to build equitable, interconnected social service ecosystems that provide holistic support to vulnerable individuals and families”.
Change Well Project has a strategy for 2023 to create the implementation process to implement the Action Plan. Called Community Design Sessions, they are two day long gatherings. The first one was this past June 28 and 29. The next one is August 31 and September 1. Then October 19 and 20. Finally December 7 and 8. The Community Design Sessions reconvene Work Groups from last year that helped create the Action Plan.
The RAC meets a week before the Community Design Sessions to help put the two day long Agenda together.
I was extremely happy with how June 28 and 29 went. It was at Joshua House, a clinic with Los Angeles Christian Health Center. About 60 folks attended, a solid cross section of Skid Row residents/former residents, nonprofit organizations, and government officials.
Part of the first day was Storytelling and Dr. Alisa had volunteer members of the RAC finish a story based on prompts she handed us. It was a story you created by finishing the sentences.
Here is the one I did with her words in bold and how I finished the sentences.
Once upon a time there was a place called Joshua House. Every day I would walk past and think, is this named after some guy named Joshua I don’t even know or is this about crossing over into the Promised Land? One day I walked inside and found myself in an implementation community design gathering for the Skid Row Action Plan. Because of that I learned all kinds of good stuff. Because of that I said, yeah, this is about crossing over into the Promised Land. Until finally, it was all milk and honey.
And now several weeks later….
What concerns me is this sentence from the powerpoint slides shown at Joshua House, a slightly rewritten/updated version of a sentence in the Skid Row Action Plan report/recommendations sent to the County Board of Supervisors on December 21, 2022….Skid Row Resident Advisory Committee continues to oversee the SRAP work.
Oversee is about Authority. For an effort to be functional rather than dysfunctional, healthy rather than unhealthy, there needs to be a balance, an alignment, between Power and Authority. For the RAC and the Action Plan process, Power and Authority are way out of alignment, unbalanced.
Probably everyone has heard the phrase Knowledge is Power. Throughout 2023, Knowledge (Power) has been withheld from the RAC, or its been communicated after the fact. Sometimes that takes a dramatic form, like a June 26th Los Angeles Times article filled with important information that was new to us. Or copies of the 60 million dollar Encampment Engagement grant from the State for Skid Row not handed to us until after the Joshua House gathering began.
Back in the 1970’s, City Hall had a choice between the Silver Book and the Blue Book. The Silver Book was called that because the cover of the hundred page plan was silver. The Blue Book was called that because the cover of the hundred page plan was blue. Later called the policy of containment, the City chose the Blue Book, much of that a reaction against the increasingly controversial policy of Urban Renewal/Eminent Domain.
But let’s look at the Silver Book. The centerpiece was a massive detox/rehab center where the population of Skid Row, mainly male alcoholics, would walk into it and apparently emerge a year later ready to get a nine to five job and move to an apartment in Burbank.
My feeling is we are now inside an echo of the Silver Book. Here’s why:
From USA Today article dated August 4th, a quote by Mayor Karen Bass about Inside Safe —
“The one thing I did not want to do coming into office, I didn’t want to sit around and say, ‘We’re going to develop the best program and then we’re going to launch it,’” Bass said. “We just jumped into saving people from the street. And we have encountered a ton of issues along the way. And I’m going to keep doing it.”
Since, according to Mayor Bass, Inside Safe is being developed as it goes, Inside Safe in Skid Row will be partnership between the City and the County, which is what these sixty million dollars from the State for Encampment Engagement are all about.
This sixty million, and some of the hundreds of millions going toward the Skid Row Action Plan, will create a modern version for two or three years of the massive detox/rehab center in the Silver Book. Two or three years because it seems like no one is paying attention to ongoing funding beyond that. As folks currently in tents are brought inside this newly created County physical infrastructure and programming, I believe the sidewalks will be repaired and giant planters etc. placed there to make sure new tents don’t show up.
And so what happens to the folks safely inside this County physical infrastructure and programming after it starts collapsing in a few years? Who knows. But there’s a real good chance before then the sidewalks will be outside safe for Market Rate housing and Starbucks Coffee.