Step Up on Second is pleased to announce that the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials (NAHRO) awarded us with the 2010 National Award of Merit in Program Innovation – Affordable Housing category for our Step Up on Fifth apartments. We are proud that our of hundreds of submissions from across the nation – we received this award.

NAHRO is a professional membership organization comprised of 21,227 housing and community development agencies and officials throughout the United States who administer a variety of affordable housing and community development programs at the local level. NAHRO is the leading housing and community development advocate for the provision of adequate and affordable housing and strong, viable communities for all Americans—particularly those with low and moderate incomes.

Watch Santa Monica City TV interview with Les Jones from Step Up on Second here:

Volunteers Interviews from Cinematographer on Vimeo.

…and march to the beat of your own drum

at our 12th Annual NON-EVENT!

The Step Up on Second NON WALK-A-THON

is coming up May 22nd!

 No Shirt, No Shoes, No problem!

 Kick off your shoes,

spend the day as you choose,

and still make a significant contribution!  

(Courtesy of Rosalynn Carter for washingtonpost.com)

Former first lady, Rosalyn Carter has been a strong advocate for better mental health care for over four decades now.  The following article was published on Washington Post Blog, on May 10, 2010 by by Jennifer LaRue Huget.

By At age 82, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter could be taking life easy. Instead, she’s still hard at work on the campaign of her lifetime: She wants to see people with mental illnesses treated better, in both the medical and general sense of the word “treated.”

Carter is promoting her new book “Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis,” in which she (with co-writers Susan Golant and Kathryn Cade) documents the obstacles that people with mental illness face in the United States and offers ideas about how to remove those barriers.

Nearly 60 million U.S. adults suffer from mental illness, according to the book. On top of the obvious burden that mental illness places on a person and his or her family, Carter argues that stigma is their biggest challenge.

“Stigma is the most damaging factor in the life of anyone who has a mental illness,” Carter writes. “It humiliates and embarrasses; it is painful; it generates stereotypes, fear, and rejection; it leads to terrible discrimination. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that stigma keeps people from seeking help for fear of being labeled ‘mentally ill.’” Which is a shame, Carter told me on the phone, because “today, if detected early, we have interventions that work and can mitigate the consequences” of mental illness.

But stigma is far from the only concern mentally ill people face. They are under-served by the health-care system and encounter insurance roadblocks; they’re also more likely to die prematurely than others, Carter writes. Such issues are amplified when mental illness strikes members of cultural minorities, elderly people and children. It’s a big mess.

So what to do about this? Carter suggests the following:

• Volunteer: “There are always people in the community who advocate for the mentally ill,” Carter says. “Find a [treatment] center, work [there] and become acquainted with people with mental illness.” 
• Call Congress: “Look up your Congresspeople and local people and tell them how important it is to fund these programs I’ve written about” in her book. “We always need money for mental health.” 
• Watch your kids: “Fifty percent of mental illness is detected by age 14,” Carter says. Parents should be on the lookout from the time their children are babies for anything unusual about the way they interact with others or any delays in reaching developmental milestones, she said. Any issues should be brought to a doctor’s attention. 
• Encourage communication: If you know someone with mental illness, encourage them to talk about it. “It’s so good when they talk about it, go public. They’re going to find there are so many people in the same position,” she says. 
• Read up: If nothing else, Carter suggests, people “can read my book and spread the word.”

Okay, I’ll do my part by encouraging communication. Do you or a loved one suffer from mental illness? Would you share your story or insights, please, in the Comments section?

“I’m Kerry, what’s your name?”

It’s 4:30 a.m. on Monday, and Kerry Morrison, a Hancock Park mother of two teens, stops a limping man named Vicente at a Chevron station on Highland Avenue in Hollywood. The tall woman with the clipboard is calm, friendly and matter of fact.

“I want to ask you some questions about being homeless.”

With a bit of sweet talk—and a free meal card from Subway—Morrison cajoles Vicente to share his saga of street life, which includes frostbite, substance abuse and jail time.

“I’m so happy that this is finally happening,” Morrison says walking down Hollywood Boulevard after speaking to Vicente. “We need to do everything we can to humanize the homeless.”

Morrison is one of more than 50 volunteers collecting data for the Hollywood Homeless Registry, a three-night survey that marks the first detailed study of the full homeless population in that area.

She’s also the driving force behind the whole effort.

Morrison, 54, is executive director of the Hollywood Entertainment Business Improvement District, a band of 250 business owners working to improve economic and quality of life conditions on Hollywood Boulevard. She’s worked for more than two years to bring together non-profits, government and business groups in a coalition called Hollywood 4WRD to help end the neighborhood’s longstanding homeless problem.

“Kerry’s been the hub,” says Fabio Conti, owner of Fabiolus Café on Sunset Boulevard who brought jackets and blankets to hand out to the homeless. “She’s the happiest lady in the world when she’s talking to these people.”

Beth Sandor, field director in Los Angeles for Common Ground, a homeless advocacy group that developed the four-page “vulnerability index” questionnaire used in the survey, praised Morrison as “one of the most committed business leaders in Los Angeles on the issue of ending homelessness.”

The purpose of Common Ground’s 38-question survey is to identify those most likely to die on the streets and provide them with housing and comprehensive medical, mental health and social services. The questions focus on factors such as the number of recent emergency-room visits, jail stints, substance abuse problems and chronic illnesses.

The vulnerability index was instrumental in the creation of Project 50, the groundbreaking program launched more than two years ago at the urging of Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky that has housed and provided services for 66 once-chronically homeless individuals on L.A.’s Skid Row. That program has now been replicated in other parts of Yaroslavsky’s district, including Venice, Santa Monica and Van Nuys.

Before the pre-dawn launch of the Hollywood effort, the supervisor spoke to the survey volunteers and then headed onto the streets with them. By Wednesday afternoon, questionnaires had been completed for 257 homeless men. Another 70 declined to participate. More than 82 percent of the Hollywood homeless were men, whose ages ranged from late teens to a newly-homeless man of 80.

Morrison once seemed like an unlikely champion for Hollywood’s homeless. Raised in a middle-class Denver suburb, the daughter of a steel salesman, Morrison worked in government affairs at the California Association of Realtors for over a decade after moving to L.A. in the late 1970s.

Jolted by the 1992 riots to aid in the city’s recovery, she became executive director of the new Hollywood business improvement district, and came face to face with the neighborhood’s homeless problem.

As Hollywood worked to gentrify, some business owners—and many residents—hoped the solution to the homeless problem was simply to move the street people out. Morrison disagreed and vowed to educate herself and her board members.

She came to prefer the “permanent supportive housing” model, in which individuals are given apartments along with a variety of services to help them lead more stable and healthy lives. Her view was far from prevalent. When a 60-unit project was proposed for Gower Avenue in 2006, the backlash stunned Morrison.

“The community vitriol was mind-boggling,” she recalls. To this day, the project remains on hold.

In 2008, Morrison invited then-President Bush’s homeless czar, Philip Mangano, to make the case for permanent supportive housing as a better solution than shelters for the urban homeless. Later, she organized a field trip to visit Step Up on Second’s permanent supportive housing facility in Santa Monica. She put together a “snapshot” count of Hollywood’s homeless that year that found about 500 people living on the streets.

As part of her education, Morrison also realized she needed to get closer to her homeless neighbors. “I made a commitment to start talking to homeless people,” she recalls. “I had to conquer my own fears.”

She befriended local street people, including a mentally-ill man named Torrey who slept along the Walk of Fame until Morrison pushed for his hospitalization. He now lives in a Hollywood motel, although he declines to take his medication, Morrison says.

The experience taught her that it was essential for business owners and the public to see the homeless as people with individual stories.

That’s why the Hollywood team will take the unusual step of announcing the names and profiles of the 10 most vulnerable among Hollywood’s homeless at a news conference at 2 p.m. Friday at the Los Angeles Film School, 6353 Sunset Boulevard.

“We know that getting housing for them won’t happen unless we put the names and faces to the issue,” Morrison says.

The problem, Morrison notes, is that there aren’t yet apartments and housing in place for these individuals. Step Up on Second has bought a motel on Vine Street for permanent supportive homeless housing, but construction has yet to get underway. A committee is working to identify other housing possibilities, Morrison says.

She hopes publicity from the survey will lead to housing breakthroughs. She notes happily that Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge and two staffers joined the survey Tuesday morning and hopes he and other city leaders will come through with help on the housing front.

“The survey is an essential step,” says Morrison. “I’m incredibly optimistic that Hollywood can be a community that can embrace the homeless.”

This article came from Zev Yaroslavsky’s website http://zev.lacounty.gov/news/social-services/top-story-social-services/embracing-the-hollywood-homeless

My alarm went off at 3:00 a.m., rousing me from bed for a trip to Hollywood to participate in a new count of homeless people—one in a series of such surveys conducted in Skid Row and throughout my supervisorial district during the past 2 ½ years.

The purpose of this count, like the others, was to identify as many homeless people as possible and determine who among them is most likely to die on the streets unless they’re given the services and housing they desperately need. Each individual is asked a series of scripted questions about their health, mental health, substance abuse, economics or any combination of the above.

At the end of this week’s three-day Hollywood survey—conducted under the guidance of Common Ground, a New York-based non-profit that pioneered this technique—a list will be turned over to the county and its service providers. We then will begin the delicate and difficult process of convincing these vulnerable individuals to accept our offer of housing and services.

The team I joined on Monday covered an area bounded by La Brea, Highland, Franklin and Sunset. Our team leader was a highly motivated and passionate intern from People Assisting the Homeless (PATH) by the name of Alex Cornell, who is pursuing a divinity degree. We were told we needed to complete our survey before sunrise, in the hours before the homeless would begin to scatter for the day.

In the pre-dawn chill, in the shadow of boutique hotels and gentrified storefronts, we found people asleep on church steps, in parks and on bus benches. Alex gently approached each of our prospective clients and asked if they’d cooperate in answering the questionnaire. As an inducement, they were offered a $5 coupon from Subway sandwiches. While most agreed to participate, some wanted only to be left alone, despite our offer of food.

I have to confess that I had not planned to spend the whole 2 ½ hours on the streets of Hollywood in the middle of the night interviewing the homeless. But once I got started, I couldn’t stop. With each person we interviewed, I felt a sense of responsibility to them and an even greater sense of the possibilities we could offer to help avert a tragic end to their lives.

The first man we found was sleeping in a pocket park off of Franklin Avenue. He’d been homeless for 8 years, most of them in Hollywood and most of them in that park. He said he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury in an accident some years ago and had no memory of anything. His name, he said, was Frank Sinatra. I suspect he’ll end up on Common Ground’s “vulnerability index” as one of the homeless who’ll rank among the area’s most likely to die on the streets without services and housing.

As we walked down La Brea Ave. between Hollywood and Sunset, we found a man in his late 50’s sleeping on a cot in the front yard of an apartment building. He offered a different face of the problem of homelessness on our streets.

Homeless for two months, he said he has a B.A. from UCLA and was honorably discharged from the United States Navy. I asked what precipitated his life of homelessness in Hollywood. He said that he’d been living with his mother in Altadena when her failing health forced her to move into a convalescent hospital. To pay the costs, she needed to sell her house, leaving her son without a roof.

One of our other teams found a colony of homeless people living in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl—more than 20 of them led by their “mayor,” an armed forces veteran who has been homeless for more than two decades. One of the tragedies of homelessness in our country is that somewhere between 20% and 25% of the homeless are veterans of our armed forces. They answered the call of our nation, and now it’s time for us to answer their call for help.

That’s what the Hollywood homeless count is all about. We’ve already had success with this approach in Skid Row, in Venice, in Santa Monica and in other communities, where “permanent supportive housing” will be provided in the months ahead to nearly 500 of the most chronically and vulnerable homeless on our streets.

These are the individuals who’ll end up in our jails and emergency rooms multiple times during the course of a year if they’re not housed and provided with crucial health and mental health services. On the streets, they run up a fortune in health and incarceration costs. Providing them with permanent supportive housing will actually save our county and society money because these individuals will no longer end up in jail or in emergency rooms with anything approaching the same frequency.

I know that the magnitude of our homeless problem can seem intimidating and insurmountable. But this is a problem of individual lives, not statistics. Common Ground’s “vulnerability index” gives us a biography of sorts for each of these people, giving us new and deeper insights into their struggles and exactly what they need to have lives restored. Our job is to take those biographies—those life stories—and change their trajectories.

To see a video of Zev addressing homeless volunteers before heading onto the streets, click here.

This article came from Zev Yarsolavsky’s Blog: http://zev.lacounty.gov/blog/hope-on-the-streets-of-hollywood

Wed. 3:30am: Rain changes the homeless landscape as individuals relocate for more to cover. In new locations, two people agreed to be interviewed who yesterday refused. I interviewed a person, 34, who has been living on the streets of Hollywood for 5 years. He has SSI benefits and isn’t connected to any services. He has given up looking for housing because as he “doesn’t think it would work out”. His drug abuse continues. At first he declined to have his photo taken, but later, in a glimmer of hope, he allowed us to take his picture so that we could possibly find him again if housing opened up. In my heart, I dedicated this interview to all the family members out there who wish they knew where there loved one was. Who, every night, say a prayer for their loved ones safety. Who never give up the hope that one day there will be more light than tunnel for their loved one.

Join us for the Community Brief-Back 4/30/10 at 2p to learn the results of the Common Ground Vulnerability Index surveys done 3:30-6:30am this week in Hollywood. For more info visit Facebook: 100,000 Homes – Hollywood, CA.

Team W9: 3:30am. We went out two-by-two this morning. First stop, three individuals sleeping on the parking.

One team woke up a middle aged man who, at first, declined to be interviewed. But as the interviewers continued to just visit with him, he opened up and agreed saying, “I’m going to trust that you are here to do only what you say you are going to do.” As he completed the survey with us, his openness, honesty, and vulnerability were very touching. He has been living on the street for about 10 years. He was very clear in his answers and lucid. He had three years of college. He does not receive benefits of any kind or have health insurance. After he completed the survey he agreed to having his photo taken. He sat up. He was good looking, friendly, with a good sense of humor. He seemed to have adapted to using the existing services.  But I wondered what would be possible for this man if we were able to say – “here’s the key to your own place”.

While our other team was interviewing two individuals, we could hear them all sharing a good laugh together. We also interviewed a gentleman sleeping at the bus stop. He was unaware that he was sitting about half a block from a food back, a feeding program, and showers. Another man who looked in need of care was sleeping near the park. When we approached him, he said “not now, come back later”. I hope we can.

After each interaction with the human being behind the label “homeless”, I feel the need to go cry. With each connection it is a little harder to numb myself to their plight. It is a little harder to convince myself that their problems are not my problem. It’s a little harder to stand by and watch their exile. Many of those being interviewed receive services with nearby GettLove and recognize Sonny and Keegan. One of the main operating principles of GettLove is companionship. GettLove is one of the points of light in Hollywood…