02. Build Transformative Relationships, Program and Policy Design

The lack of transformative relationships with staff, the LEAB board, BIPOC-led providers and community stakeholders limits the organization’s ability to advance racial justice.

01

Limited Inclusion Efforts

Frontline employees of LAHSA spoke passionately about their roles, purpose and affinity to the communities they serve, but also discussed the disconnect between the racialized and emotional toll of their work and the experiences and the available resources and understanding from LAHSA leadership. For example, the Access and Engagement department, which represents the majority of the organization, is the most diverse team and has a higher representation of Black staff as compared to other departments, shared missed opportunities to center the experiences and identifies of frontline staff as a path to better center the experiences and identifies of the communities served by LAHSA. For example, staff discussed the disregard of HET team feedback during the pending decision on assigned uniforms, which the HET team has communicated is triggering to clients and sets outreach workers at a disadvantage because of its similarities to law enforcement uniforms.

02

Lack of Professional Development and Career Pathways

As LAHSA has grown to meet the needs of the community and as the organization has prepared to implement a new governance and programming structure, there is consensus that internally, LAHSA’s growth potential was described by staff as not being evenly distributed in relationship to the diverse demographics of the organization. Through interviews and survey responses, staff commented on the need for more targeted professional development and promotion opportunities for BIPOC staff, particularly Black staff and the need to continue to diversify at the senior and executive leadership level. 

In addition to increasing representation at the senior and executive level, staff also named the importance of representation in the programmatic pillars of LAHSA. In reviewing staff demographics based on organizational departments, it was noted that most of the leadership positions driving program design and budget decisions were held by white staff, in contrast to the overrepresentation of Black people in the homeless population in Los Angeles.

LAHSA hires more white people into executive leadership roles and does not provide enough support for people of color to gain leadership opportunities, hiring outside of the agency instead of building leadership within.

LAHSA Staff Member

03

Lived Experience Advisory Board

The Lived Experience Advisory Board (LEAB) was created in 2016, to contribute to the Measure H funding advocacy activities. LAHSA’s Executive Director at that time supported the continuation of the board to provide help with other LAHSA activities related to the annual PIT count, program design and policy advisory.  Over the course of two LEAB meetings and across  in-depth interviews, members highlighted the following ways the current structure and relationship with LAHSA is experienced as transactional and inequitable:

Representation, Purpose, Decision-Making Authority: Neither LEAB members nor assigned LAHSA staff could state the role and purpose of the board beyond attending monthly meetings facilitated by LAHSA and responding to and/or reacting to what other stakeholders (LAHSA staff and consultants,  Commission, City and County Staff) determined was a priority. In discussing the lack of role and purpose as a board, members expressed concerns about the lack of representation in relation to the geographic and cultural needs of the different SPAs. Through discussion, members reflected that representation on the board did not and could not adequately reflect the multi-racial needs and intersectionality of people experiencing homelessness in the community. This lack of representation was related to informing the role and purpose of LEAB and other mechanisms to engage people with lived experiences to advise the work of LAHSA. 

Related, is the lack of authority and decision-making power LEAB has in the board’s desire to hold LAHSA accountable. This constant struggle and tension was shared by both staff and board members when talking about priority-setting and desired access to LAHSA executive leadership.   

There is no foundation, no guidance, no guidelines that we are operating from. We have no power in order to understand who we are. We just show up once a month or when there are special or additional meetings.

LEAB Member

Things are brought to us at the last minute.  No information in advance to study, review, and  understand. No language to give you an understanding of what the presentation is- no history, purpose or  reasons as to why this is something they want to move on.

LEAB Member

Being Tokenized, Disrespected and Devalued: LEAB members expressed that although they individually brought years of personal experience, educational and professional expertise to their roles, their value as a board member continues to be limited to their ethnicity and their lived experience, perpetuating the idea that LAHSA was only interested in the LEAB board as a box to check or, as one board member put it, add a “window dressing” on their process. Experiences of feeling tokenized also came up in relation to the lack of communication and follow-through on policy efforts and program design that LEAB did provide feedback to.  Although LAHSA staff could point to the impact of LEAB input on efforts such as Project Room Key and the Homeless Count Rules, board members expressed that they were never informed of what came from their engagement and/or feedback, or that they would learn about it after a policy was already passed or after a program had been implemented.  

In response to discussions of how race and racism showed up in their experience as board members, there were a mix of responses that spoke to interpersonal dynamics between board members related to roles and perceptions of positional power, as well as interpersonal dynamics between the board members and LAHSA staff.  Members who NIS spoke with used terms like “disrespected,” “treated like a child,” and “treated like a threat,” in talking about experiences when trying to express themselves, asking for transparency in a process, asking for professional development resources or challenging a process or decision.

We try to come with ideas of policy but we are ignored. We are window dressing. That needs to stop. We are either helping the process or you are wasting our time. You got your degree but we are the ones with the PHDs in homelessness.

LEAB Member

Being Under-resourced and Underpaid:  The constant turnover and reassignment of support staff to the LEAB was expressed as another signal of deprioritization of LEAB role and activities within the organization. Members reflected that not only did frequent change in staff require the need to rebuild trust and credibility with a new individual; it also meant there were gaps of time where the work and support of LEAB was put on hold completely until LAHSA was ready to pick the work back up again. Compounded with the instability of the coordination role, LEAB’s compensation policy,  primarily based on attendance to meetings, is received as paternalistic and tokenizing to members who are available to be more deeply involved in the work of education and awareness, program design and policy advisory on behalf of their community.

The turnover has been bad. When Project RoomKey was launched,  they pulled everyone and we were left in the dark- we had to keep banging on the door to have them (LAHSA) speak to us.

LEAB Member