Westwood works to reduce homeless population near campus and educate students on how to help
By Becca Holt
Feb. 6, 2012 1:35 a.m.
Neighborhood groups began working this January to reduce Westwood Village’s homeless population, including establishing a contract with a non-profit organization for the homeless and planning an educational campaign for UCLA students.
The Westwood Business Improvement District contracted $45,000 of work to People Assisting the Homeless, a group that works with transient populations across Los Angeles, on Jan. 19. The non-profit has plans to train the district’s current staff in Westwood to assist with the project, said Jeremy Sidell, chief development and communications officer with People Assisting the Homeless.
In a survey of Westwood residents’ and business owners’ main concerns, homelessness emerged as a top priority, said Andrew Thomas, executive director of the improvement district.
The Business Improvement District was given $1.3 million about six months ago to be spent in Westwood according to its stakeholders’ wishes. Currently, the district sends out staff, called ambassadors, daily to clean the streets and sidewalks of the Village. The ambassadors deal directly with the homeless in their daily cleaning activities, Thomas said.
Ambassadors will be trained by People Assisting the Homeless to connect homeless people in Westwood to the non-profit’s social services.
One of the organization’s first priorities in the Village is to take a census of the neighborhood’s homeless, Sidell said. While estimates of the population exist, numbers at this point are very much anecdotal, he said.
Once the organization knows exactly who the homeless of Westwood are, why they are on the streets and what they need, Sidell said, it will be able to connect the individuals with specific services, including beds at the non-profit’s own shelter in West Los Angeles.
The contract with the improvement district will not be PATH’s first time working in Westwood ““ the organization was founded in the neighborhood in 1984. Claire West Orr, the non-profit’s founder, started the organization as an emergency food program out of the Westwood Presbyterian Church, where her husband Charles served as pastor.
Since its founding, the organization has grown to serve homeless populations all across Los Angeles, working on a $12 to 13 million annual budget, Sidell said.
“(There is) a great deal of excitement about working in Westwood. It’s a community we care very deeply about. It’s where we have our roots,” Sidell said. “We are really … thrilled to be coming home.”
The Westwood Homeless Task Force ““ a committee created by the Westwood Community Council in September ““ is also actively working to deal with the growing homeless issue in the Village.
The task force’s efforts are separate from, but supportive of, the Business Improvement District’s contract with People Assisting the Homeless.
Wolfgang Veith, a member of the Westwood Community Council and a North Village resident, said the community feels “conflicted” about the issue.
“(Homelessness is) not very aesthetic to look at, but at the same time … people (wonder) “˜What if I were in their shoes?'” Veith said.
The task force, which has spent the last few months learning about the realities of homelessness in Westwood, is not looking for a “cosmetic fix,” said Steve Sann, chair of the Westwood Community Council.
“There are some folks who all they want to do is sweep the homeless away,” he said. “Although we acknowledge that feeling, and we know it comes from … frustration, we said very early on that is not the approach that the Homeless Task Force wants to take or is going to endorse.”
Sann said the Westwood community needs to be educated on basic facts about the area’s homeless population.
From observation, the task force estimates that fewer than 50 percent of individuals that appear to be homeless in Westwood are legitimately homeless. Sann and John Heidt, co-chair of the task force, said the remainder are professional panhandlers ““ people who come to the Village and portray themselves as homeless to make money, despite actually having a home.
Adam Swart, a third-year political science student and chief of staff in the Undergraduate Students Association Council President’s Office who is part of the council’s task force, said he felt those who professionally panhandle belittle the situation of the people who are legitimately homeless.
As part of the educational campaign, the community council wants students to stop giving cash directly to the homeless in the Village. Donations should instead be directed toward non-profits that work at the root causes of homelessness, organizers said.
“Even though it’s coming from the warmest place in students’ hearts, giving money to people on the streets is actually one of the cruelest things a person can do ““ (donors) are prolonging their condition of misery,” Sann said.
The university is a big draw for both the homeless and panhandlers because of the generosity of UCLA students, Sann said.
Swart said, however, that students cannot be discouraged from giving to the homeless they encounter on a daily basis without an alternative.
One such alternative the task force has proposed is installing donation boxes throughout the Village to give students a means to combat the homelessness they see around them without giving directly to homeless individuals, Sann said.
Donations to the proposed boxes, which the community council hopes to place in areas most frequented by students, would be given as grants to service groups such as People Assisting the Homeless, or kept within the task force’s funds for continued educational campaigns, Heidt said.
