As many sit down to dinner with friends and family this week to give thanks for what they have in their lives — a job, clothes on their back, a home — there are many who do not have the same opportunity.
On any given night, according to Shelter Partnership, Inc., there are 84,000 homeless people in Los Angeles County.
Hoping to mitigate the statistics is Pepperdine sociology student Amy Turk.
Turk, 22, is the main organizer behind National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, which is sponsored by the National Student Campaign against Hunger and Homelessness and the National Coalition for the Homeless.
A Pepperdine audience, consisting mostly of sociology students, got a taste of the life on the streets through the Faces of Homelessness Panel on Nov. 13.
The panel was the first of four events that took place last week as part of the campaign.
At the second event, which took place the following evening, the documentary, “Taylor’s Campaign,” was shown. It presented a look at the homeless population in Santa Monica and efforts by formally homeless Ron Taylor to reverse laws effecting people living in the streets by running for the Santa Monica City Council. Later in the week, a “Hunger Banquet” took place, followed by a Family Volunteer Day.
The aim, as the title of the event suggests, was to raise awareness and perhaps provoke action toward mitigating the homeless problem.
Issues and possible solutions for eradicating homelessness discussed throughout the week were as varied as the participants were diverse.
Among the participants of the first night’s event were three people who had or are currently living in the streets. David Busch became homeless in 1992 after his family’s business failed. He now earns his “living” through profits from a homeless newspaper.
Next to him sat David Fermin, a recovering homeless drug addict determined to straighten out his life with the help of his belief in Jesus Christ, and Patricia Robbins, a woman who was let go from her job after 16 years of employment and lost her savings soon afterward.
The Homeless Panels moderators — Jill Jones from the Legal Aid Clinic at Union Rescue Mission, and Celeste Liversidge, co-founder of Dream Center, a mobile source of legal aid and free medical care for homeless people , both Pepperdine Law School graduates, — considered their contributions of free legal advice surface measures.
“I don’t see a legal solution to homelessness,” said Jones.
“If domestic violence is the problem, we might get a restraining order,” she pointed out. But we don’t solve the underlying family problem.”
They focused instead on problems within the system.
“Until a year ago, my routine response when I saw a homeless person in front of 7-11 was, ‘This person has made a choice to stay in the streets,’ ” explained Jones. “It’s a hard response. You see all the programs offered and think, why aren’t people taking advantage of them? Then I became aware of the gap between the human being and the resource.”
According to statistics from the Shelter Partnership Inc., 2000, there is one bed available for every seven people who are homeless in Los Angeles County. Most of the existing shelters require residents to remain sober, accept counseling, seek jobs or, in some cases, participate in religious services. These policies exclude people like Fermin, who was suffering from a drug addiction when he was on the streets, or others who resent the subjection of spiritual philosophies they might not agree with.
“Just because a person is homeless doesn’t mean he is helpless,” Busch explained.
After sojourns at four different shelters in Los Angeles, Busch opted to fend for himself.
“It’s not difficult to get fed in America, just go to the nearest dumpster,” he said. “The deeper issue is that we’re throwing away enough edible food to feed 200 million people. If we want to come up with a plan that works, we should make it illegal to throw away food.”
While the country produces enough food to feed all hungry people, distribution problems prevent goods from reaching those who need it.
Taylor, who had hoped to reverse injurious Santa Monica laws aimed against the poor along “skid-row by the sea” by serving on the City Council, ended his documentary on a dispirited note.
“I was convinced that if I won, I could make a difference,” he said, after losing the election. “But I don’t think politicians can make a difference.”
Turk, who hopes, eventually, to secure low-cost housing for the homeless, wondered if her dreams were just a lot of rhetoric.
Busch also worries about waning concern for the indigent in the last 20 years.
As Jones pointed out, “There is no stereotypical homeless person.” Thirty percent are families, 19 percent are veterans, 25 percent are addicted to drugs or alcohol, about 20 percent are mentally ill or have experienced domestic violence and others are just on the streets because they lost their jobs or families and haven’t been able to put their lives back together again. To offer a single solution for such a diverse problem is optimistic. The state can only deal with issues on a mass scale.