Downtown Women’s Center: Ending Homelessness for Women in Los Angeles

The Downtown Women’s Center works to give homeless women permanent housing and a safe, healthy community that increases their self-respect and personal stability. Their goal is to eradicate homelessness for women.

The Downtown Women’s Center (DWC) opened in 1978. Before their existance, homeless women were dominated by the “man’s world” of Skid Row and other homeless areas that were only accessible to men. Women, especially mentally ill women, were left homeless on the streets with the closing of psychiatric hospitals in the early 1970s. Thus, Jill Halverson in 1978 founded the city’s first day center for women providing a place to live and meals to women in need.

Statistics: Women in Homelessness

• Over 50% of homeless women are homeless due to domestic violence.
• 75% of poor elderly people are women.
• 60% of women getting public assistance have been victims of domestic violence
• 14% of the homeless population are single women
• 92% of homeless mothers were victims of physical or sexual assault

Women and children are often referred to as “the hidden homeless” because they are the most turned away group of people from homeless shelters due to safety concerns of aggressive homeless men.

“It is not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.” – President Barack Obama

The DWC provides lasting solutions for homeless women and the children they provide for.

Give Back to the Downtown Women’s Center to Help Homeless Women

You can volunteer or donate to the Downtown Women’s Center to give back.

Volunteering at the Downtown Women’s Center is an easy process. You can choose from one of their available volunteer opportunities and then fill out the individual application or group application and send it to volunteer@dwcweb.org. Then you will have to attend a volunteer orientation/training session (which is not required for all volunteer positions). Check out their events calendar to see which dates work for you.

Don’t have time to volunteer? You can always donate money or in-kind donations. Donate online or send a check to 325 S. Los Angeles Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013. $36 provides a monthly management session for 3 DWC residents and $2000 provides a year of individual and group counseling reaching over 100 women. Every bit helps. For more information on how to donate click here.

You can also contact the Downtown Women’s Center at 213-680-6000 (administrative offices) or 213-613-0761 (day center). They are located at 442 S. San Pedro Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

Children’s Bureau: A Leader in Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment

The Children’s Bureau works to prevent child abuse and neglect, to protect and nurture abused children, to enhance families to meet the needs of their children, and to advance foster care, adoption, child development, parent education, and research. Their goal it to give vulnerable children the foundation to become productive adults.

Children’s Bureau started in 1904 and since then has worked to provide shelters, foster homes, and refuges for abused children and their families. Their advanced child abuse prevention and treatment services works in the positive direction to give a voice and a helping hand to children who are in at-risk positions.

Child Abuse Statistics

• 1 child abuse report is made every 10 seconds.
• 5 children die every day from child abuse. 75% are under age 4.
• 60-85% of child fatalities are due to maltreatment that is not recorded on death certificates.
• 90% of child sexual abuse victims know the perpetrator; 68% are family members.
• 31% of women in prison were abused as children.
• 60% of people in drug rehabilitation centers were abused as a child.
• 80% of 21 year olds that were abused as children classify with at least one psychological disorder.
• The annual cost of child abuse is $104 billion (2007).

(Source: www.childhelp.org)

Help a Child in Need

You can donate your time and money to Children’s Bureau by volunteering, donating, or adopting a foster child.

Donate now to Children’s Bureau. Gifts of $1000 or more are recognized in their annual giving program, Century Circle for Children.

You can also adopt or foster a child in need. There are currently 63,000 children in foster care and over 12,000 waiting for adoptive families. You can click here to fill out a form that will keep you up to date about scheduling upcoming meetings or call 800-730-3933. For an application, click here or you can visit their website at all4kids.org. You can complete the application and mail it to them at:

Children’s Bureau
Foster Care & Adoptions
1910 Magnolia Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90007

or fax it to them at 213-342-0253.

You can also become a volunteer. For more information, click here or contact them at 213-342-0100.

For upcoming events and news, visit their event calendar.

Ocean Park Community Center (OPCC): Empowering People to Rebuild Their Lives

The Ocean Park Community Center is dedicated to helping people who have faced house foreclosures, job loss, medical bills, and other factors that are forcing people into homelessness. They focus on making up for the under-funded homeless population in this time of unexpected economic crisis.

The OPCC Facilities

The OPCC works at empowering people to rebuild their lives by helping them overcome mental illness, poverty, homelessness, and domestic violence. They provide the tools to help the needy gain trust in a community as a support system and regain dignity. The OPCC provides a common ground for the community and a push to end human suffering through public policy and creating a higher level of response to human services.

The OPCC is a non-profit organization. The City of Santa Monica, the County of Los Angeles, the State of California, the Federal Government, and private donations fund the company. But with the economic recession, their funds have been hit hard and they have been having to make a bigger impact with less resources.

Statistics Show Success

• 350 teens, children, and adults have received counseling through school outreach and victims of crime programs.
• 3,000 phone calls have been made on the domestic violence hotline.
• There is a 90% success rate for the graduates of the transitional housing program – they have lived in permanent housing for over a year.

The OPCC serves 8,000 individuals of which: 98% live below poverty level, 85% are homeless, 50% are mentally ill, 44% are minorities, 45% are female, and 20% are under the age of 21 (opcc.org).

A Grandmother’s Testimonial

Jane, an 81-year-old homeless woman with congestive heart failure, had been living off and on in local area motels since 2005. OPCC staff discovered that at the end of each month when she ran out of SSI income she went to the local hospitals for medical care and a place to stay. OPCC’s Access Center staff worked intensively with Jane and successfully secured permanent housing and transportation through the City of Santa Monica’s Project Homecoming. The day before Mother’s Day, Jane was reunified with her adult son and family living in another state and has been living in her own apartment and caring for herself. She has not been hospitalized in over a year.

The OPCC Access Center

Give Back to the OPCC

There are many ways to give to the OPCC. You can donate, volunteer, or give in-kind donations.

Donating is easy. You can donate to the OPCC with cash gifts, stocks and bonds, or real estate to expand their property when you’re not using it. You can even choose to which property you would like to donate. To donate now, click here.

There are plenty of volunteer opportunities. If you are interested, email dmiller@opcc.net or give a call to 310-264-6646. You can look at a list of group volunteer opportunities here.

You can give initiatives in the form of donations of gift cards and goods, becoming a trained volunteer on their 24 hour hotline, or donate to their wish list.

The Weingart Center Association: Where Transformations Happen

Keeping up with the Homeless Assistance theme this week, today we are focusing on the Weingart Center Association who works to better the homeless population through residential programs, non-residential programs, and permanent housing. The main goal: to break the cycle of homelessness and to help these individuals and families lead fulfilling, self-sufficient lives.

The Skills to Break the Homelessness Cycle

Skills that the Weingart center offers to the homeless include job assistance, permanent housing, sobriety assistance, increased education, mental and physical healthcare, pulling them out of debt, reuniting families, and setting attainable goals for the future.

They offer specific services that include:

• Legal Aid
• Work attire
• Transitional and Permanent Housing
• Education
• Substance Abuse Support
• Healthcare (mental health, medical health, family planning)
• Life and workforce skills
• Nutrition

Their individualized and compassionate support that adapts to the changing community has made a huge impact on the large homeless community in Los Angeles.

Making an Impact

From Operation Welcome Home, a program helping to assimilate veterans back into society, to their Open Door Program, helping locate jobs for parolees, the Weingart Center alleviates the homeless struggles of many.

The Weingart Center Association helped me to get my life back.

They have housed 600 people every day in an 11-story building, served 225,000 healthy meals annually, created a medical clinic to control TB and HIV in the early stages, and miraculously uses 82% of funds to give back to the community.

Interested in lending a hand to the Weingart center? There are many ways for you to give back.

1. Donate: The money or goods that you donate will be used to directly help out the 48,000 homeless people in Los Angeles.
2. Volunteer: By volunteering with the Weingart Center you can directly affect a life. The Weingart Center suggests organizing a clothing drive, sponsoring an event, giving a participant a make over, volunteering at one of their many volunteer events, or becoming a Weingart Center partner.
3. Wish List: Give back by ordering the Weingart Center one of the items on their wish list.

For upcoming events, visit their event page and their blog. You can even call the Weingart Center Association at 213-627-9000 and email them at center@weingart.org. Their address is 566 South San Pedro Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

Los Angeles Mission: Ameliorating the Homeless on Skid Row

For over 70 years, the Los Angeles Mission has worked serving the homeless population living on the streets of Skid Row. They pride themselves on providing “compassionate, humanitarian services to those in desperate need.”

Skid Row is in Downtown Los Angeles, specifically Central City East with one of the largest stable homeless populations in the country. Between seven and eight thousand people live on Skid Row. The Los Angeles Mission works to help Skid Row resident women, men and children in need.

What makes the Los Angeles Mission so different is that they build their core values on hope, love, compassion, and healthy relationships. They focus on helping the homeless battle alcoholism, drug addiction, physical and emotional abuse and a lack of education, healthcare, and employment.

Celebrities are known to frequent the Los Angeles Mission events offering food and shelter to many homeless people on Skid Row. 3,000 Christmas dinners were passed out by celebrities on Christmas Eve, hosted by Jennifer Love Hewitt who said:

“Anyone would be moved by the kids on Skid Row meeting Santa and receiving gifts on Christmas Eve.”

Young Disney stars serve Thanksgiving at Los Angeles Mission

Are you interested in volunteering with the Los Angeles Mission?

Orientations are scheduled regularly and they welcome both individual and group volunteers. You can call (213) 639-1227 for more information of visit the Los Angeles Mission website.  You can also make an online donation if you do not have time to go down and help out firsthand.

Want to know more? Follow them on twitter at @ilovelamission.