Across survey responses, interviews and listening sessions, participants were asked questions about their experiences and perceptions of LAHSA, how they define LAHSA’s commitment to racial equity, why they think racial inequities exist within LAHSA through their individual experiences, and their ideas for opportunities to address them. The remainder of this report is structured around the opportunities identified by participants in the discovery process with NIS, and the thematic findings that underlie those opportunities.
This engagement illuminated what NIS found to be a fundamental tension between LAHSA’s current state as a large, fast growing, white-led organization responding to the largest population of Black people experiencing homelessness in the country, and the agency’s goal of becoming an antiracist organization. This tension has coalesced around four overall findings.
In the following section, the findings are further explicated and additional opportunities for transformation are identified. Many of these opportunities stemmed directly from our conversations with staff, whose experience we’re centering in this work. They are structured in a sequence that moves from short-term opportunities internal to LAHSA towards longer-term opportunities that would require LAHSA to advocate for change external to the agency.
Based on the organizational audit, engagement with a diverse group of staff from across the organization and with LEAB board members, NIS proposes the following set of goals and priorities to advance LAHSA’s capacity and ability to be justice-based through equitable policies and practices. In developing the proposed recommendations, the following questions were asked and used as the design criteria:
- Does it advance racial justice?
- Do it accurately capture what staff identified as a priority?
- Is it measurable by LAHSA? (i.e., Can LASHA develop concrete metrics to track progress and accomplishments)?