Community
Veterans receive free resources at U.S. VETS Inglewood
WAVE NEWSPAPERS — Los Angeles County is currently grappling with a homeless crisis and statistics indicate that veterans in the county experience homelessness at a higher rate than the civilian population. Los Angeles County leads the way with the largest population of homeless veterans in the country.
By Shirley Hawkins
INGLEWOOD — As the country celebrates Independence Day, thousands of military veterans who fought for their country are living under freeways, seeking refuge in shelters or simply surviving on the streets.
Los Angeles County is currently grappling with a homeless crisis and statistics indicate that veterans in the county experience homelessness at a higher rate than the civilian population. Los Angeles County leads the way with the largest population of homeless veterans in the country.
In January, volunteers from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority counted 3,874 veterans living in tents, cars or on the street.Approximately 2,800 veterans received housing last year in Los Angeles, but vets sleeping on the streets or in temporary shelters still increased by 12%.
Due to the extreme housing shortages and high rents in L.A. County, many veterans find themselves losing their residences. Statistics indicate that the same number of vets — 12% — fall into homelessness, many for the first time. The population of former military personnel living on the streets dropped by just 12 individuals between 2018 and 2019.
But the nonprofit U. S. VETS in Inglewood, located at 733 Hindry Ave., is on a mission to assist veterans with free services and to provide housing for as many veterans as possible.
U. S. VETS Inglewood Executive Director Akilah Templeton said she is dedicated to helping vets transition off the streets and move into permanent housing.
“It’s been quite a journey, but every day you have the opportunity to serve,” she said, adding, “Currently, we have 600 vets at the site and 225 of those are in transitional housing.”
U.S Vets opened its doors in 1993 with only five clients. Since then, it has grown to operate more than 600 beds and supplies both transitional and permanent housing. To date, the organization has served more than 10,000 veterans.Funds to run the facility are derived from local and federal funding, including funds from the Veterans Administration, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, several banks as well as individual and corporate donors.
Housed in an eight-story, white brick building, the nonprofit organization provides drug and alcohol counseling and free housing as well as comprehensive supportive services that include individual case management, employment assistance, job placement, psychological counseling and social activities. A workforce program helps more than 100 veterans return to employment each year.
Services include Veterans in Progress, which prepares veterans to obtain and maintain employment while providing comprehensive support including housing, counseling and basic needs.
The Fathers Program helps non-custodial fathers to become more emotionally and financially involved in their children’s lives and helps them find employment along with comprehensive support.
The High Barriers Program works with veterans who have additional obstacles to overcome in seeking employment including advanced age, a history of felonies and incarceration or long periods of unemployment.
The Substance Abuse Services Coordination Agency (SASCA) works in conjunction with a community parolee program to provide case management, substance abuse education and re-entry programs for veterans.
The Long-Term Supportive Housing program provides affordable, sober, service-enriched rental housing for vets with employment or other income such as disability payments.
Workforce Development offers career counseling, training, interviewing skills, job placement services and employment support.
Sixty-four year old Bobby Lee Marshall, a resident at U.S. VETS, said that the organization has been a godsend.
Born in Mississippi and raised in Arkansas, Marshall joined the U.S. Army. While traveling with his unit to Beirut, Lebanon, he got hurt and fell off a five-ton trunk.
“When I went home, my mother died and I started drinking,” he recalls. “I turned to alcohol and drugs. I came to California and lived on Skid Row. I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and I slept in boxes on the street.
“A friend told me about U.S. VETS. He had been at his lowest ebb, but he had gone from zero to hero. He came back to see me on Skid Row and he looked and smelled good. He was working at the Veteran’s Administration. He said, ‘Hey, I’m at this place called U.S. VETS and you should come and check it out,’” Marshall said.
“I decided to try it too. When I got here, so many powerful things began to take place. I started working on myself, working to receive my benefits and started using the career center here. I started doing gardening on the grounds and that lifted my spirits.
“Now I’m back in touch with my family. It had been eight years since I had seen my family because I was pitying myself feeling ashamed about myself.”
Pausing, he said, “When vets go through these conflicts of war, it does something to the vet. A lot of times they come back home and the family cannot deal with them and they do not understand what happened to the vet.”
Marshall said the help he has received at U.S. VETS has been life transforming.
“It’s like a power touch, there’s something magical about U. S. Vets,” he said. “A vet can come here with zero and he goes to hero. You begin to feel good about yourself because they have powerful case management here.”
Templeton said that any vet can visit and learn about their services.
“A veteran can simply walk into our facility — no appointment is needed,” Templeton said. “We even provide them with a lunch.
“Then they meet with our outreach counselors for a brief screening and assessment. Once we find out what their needs are, they are placed in an individual treatment program, so they receive supplemental services from day one. If they need it, we can offer them an emergency shelter bed which allows us to house vets that may not have an honorable discharge, so we cover all the bases.”
Templeton said that U.S. VETS Inglewood is constantly reaching out to the community. Outreach workers take to the streets daily to search for veterans and to inform them about the free programs that are available.
“Many veterans are not aware that they qualify for an array of free services,” Templeton said. “I am shocked that so many veterans don’t know that we can offer them help. Every time I come face to face with a family member, a veteran or even an agency in the community, so many times they have no idea that these services at U.S. VETS exist.”
Templeton said that veterans enrolled in their programs range from young to old.
“We’re seeing a lot of younger guys coming into the program, but our senior population is rising,” she said. “Many have physical or mental health problems. We have a team of people working with them and we’re trying to meet the needs of that population.”
Templeton said the Inglewood community has really embraced U.S. VETS.
“Inglewood’s Mayor [James] Butts has been very supportive and very responsive to our needs. And the Inglewood Police Department has a homeless task force where they refer veterans to us who are living on the streets. They’re on the phone with us all the time and they are always reaching out.”
Pausing, Templeton added, “The Fourth of July is when we can all collectively enjoy our freedom. We have to remember why we are free and that is because of the sacrifices made by our service men and women and our veterans.”
U.S. VETS can be contacted by calling (310) 744-6533.
This article originally appeared in the Wave Newspapers.
Activism
Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024
The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024
To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.
Activism
“Two things can be true at once.” An Afro-Latina Voter Weighs in on Identity and Politics
“As a Puerto Rican I do not feel spoken to in discussions about Latino voters… which is ironic because we are one of the few Latino communities who are also simultaneously American,” Ortiz-Cedeño says. Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, have American citizenship by birth but they do not have the right to vote for president if they live on the island. “I think that we miss out on a really interesting opportunity to have a nuanced conversation by ignoring this huge Latino population that is indigenously American.”
By Magaly Muñoz
On a sunny afternoon at Los Cilantros Restaurant in Berkeley, California, Keyanna Ortiz-Cedeño, a 27-year-old Afro-Latina with tight curly hair and deep brown skin, stares down at her carne asada tacos, “I’ve definitely eaten more tortillas than plantains over the course of my life,” says Cedeño, who spent her childhood in South Texas, among predominantly Mexican-American Latinos. As she eats, she reflects on the views that American politicians have of Latino voters.
“As a Puerto Rican I do not feel spoken to in discussions about Latino voters… which is ironic because we are one of the few Latino communities who are also simultaneously American,” Ortiz-Cedeño says. Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, have American citizenship by birth but they do not have the right to vote for president if they live on the island. “I think that we miss out on a really interesting opportunity to have a nuanced conversation by ignoring this huge Latino population that is indigenously American.”
Ortiz-Cedeño, an urban planner who is focused on disaster resilience, homelessness and economic prosperity for people of color, says that political conversations around Latinos tend to shift towards immigration, “I think this ties back into the ways that our perception of ‘Latino’ tends to be Mexican and Central American because so much of our conversation about Latinos is deeply rooted in what’s happening on the border,” she says. “I don’t think that the Afro-Latino vote is frequently considered when we’re talking about the Latino vote in the United States.”
As Ortiz-Cedeño sifts through childhood photos of her as a happy teen dancing with the Mexican ballet folklorico group in high school and as a dama in quinceñeras, she reflects on growing up in South Texas, an area with a large population of white and Mexican-Americans. The Black population was small, and within it, the Afro-Latino population was practically nonexistent.
“It was interesting to try to have conversations with other Latinos in the community because I think that there was a combination of both willful ignorance and a sort of ill intent and effort to try and deny my experience as a Latino,” she says. “There are a lot of folks in Latin America who experience a lot of cognitive dissonance when they think about the existence of Black Latinos in Latin America.
Ortiz-Cedeño comments on the long history of anti-Blackness in Latin America. “Throughout Latin America, we have a really insidious history with erasing Blackness and I think that that has been carried into the Latino American culture and experience,” she says. “People will tell you, race doesn’t exist in Latin America, like we’re all Dominicans, we’re all Puerto Ricans, we’re all Cubans, we’re all Mexicans. If you were to go to the spaces with where people are from and look at who is experiencing the most acute violence, the most acute poverty, the most acute political oppression and marginalization, those people are usually darker. And that’s not by accident, it’s by design.”
Because of the lack of diversity in her Gulf Coast town, as a teenager, despite being the only Spanish-speaker at her job in Walmart, Latinos refused to ask for her help in Spanish.
“Even if monolingual [Spanish-speaking] people would have to speak with me, then they were trying to speak English, even though they could not speak English, versus engaging with me as a Latina,” she says.
“I think that the perception of Latinos in the United States is of a light brown person with long, wavy or straight hair. The perfect amount of curves and the perfect combination of Indigenous and white genes. And very rarely will people also consider that maybe they also have a sprinkle of Blackness in them as well,” she says. “Over 90% of the slave trade went to the Caribbean and Latin America.”
Ortiz-Cedeño remembers when a Cuban family moved in next door to her in Texas. The teen daughter had blue-eyes, blonde hair and only spoke Spanish, which caused neighboring Latinos to take pause because she didn’t fit the Latino “look” they were used to.
“People didn’t have an option to try and negate her [Latino] identity because they had to acknowledge her for everything that she was,” Ortiz-Cedeño says.
Later on, the girl’s cousins, a Black, Spanish-speaking Cuban family, came into town and again locals were forced to reckon with the fact that not all Latinos fit a certain criteria.
“I think it forced everybody to have to confront a reality that they knew in the back of their mind but didn’t want to acknowledge at the forefront,” Ortiz-Cedeño says.
Having gone through these experiences as an Afro-Latina, Ortiz-Cedeño says it’s easy for her to understand Kamala Harris’ mixed Indian and Jamaican heritage, “It comes really naturally to accept that she is both Indian and Black. Two things can exist at the same time,” she says. “I had a long term partner for about seven years who was South Indian, from the same state as Kamala Harris, so if we had had a kid, they would look like [Harris],” Ortiz-Cedeño jokingly shares.
She says she can relate to having to walk the road of people only wanting to see Harris as a Black American. The talking point about [Harris] not being Indian or not being Black, just deciding to be Black, is really disingenuous and cheap,” she says.
Ortiz-Cedeño believes that the Harris campaign has not capitalized on the vice president’s mixed identity, which could be vital in bringing together different communities to understand each other on a new level and allow for improvements on America’s racial dynamics.
As she rushes into a Berkeley Urban Planning Commission meeting straight out of Ashby BART station, Ortiz-Cedeño explains her love for talking about all things infrastructure, homelessness, and healthcare access. The topics can be dry for many, she admits, but in the end, she gets to address long-standing systemic issues that often hinder opportunities for growth for people of color.
Having lived through the effects of Hurricane Katrina as a child, with the flooding and mass migration of Louisiana residents into Texas, Ortiz-Cedeño was radicalized into issues of displacement, emergency mitigation, and housing at nine years old.
“I remember my principal had to carry her students on her shoulders and swim us home because so many parents were trying to drive in and get their kids from school [due to] the flooding that was pushing their cars away,” she recalls.
Her family relocated to Houston soon after Katrina, only to be met with a deadly Hurricane Rita. They wound up in a mega-shelter, where Ortiz-Cedeño says she heard survivors stories of the unstable conditions in New Orleans and beyond, which got her wondering about urban planning, a term she wasn’t familiar with at the time.
“I think that when you put people in the context of the things that were happening in this country around [these hurricanes], a lot of us started to really think seriously about who gets to make decisions about the urban environment,” she adds.
Watching the heavy displacement of disaster survivors, hearing stories of her Navy veteran father’s chronic homelessness, and her own mother’s work and activism with homeless communities in the non–profit sector put her on the path to progressive politics and solutions, she says. After attending college on the East Coast- where she says she was finally recognized as a Puerto Rican- and working in housing, economic development, and public policy, she returned to California to earn a Master’s in City Regional Planning from UC Berkeley.
Her vast interest in the urban success of underserved communities even took her abroad to Israel and Palestine when she was an undergraduate college student. “I’ve seen the border with Gaza, I’ve had homestays with farmers in the West Bank,” she says. “For me personally, Palestine is an issue that is really close to the heart.”
“I have a very intimate understanding of the conflict and I’m very disturbed by the way in which the [Democratic] party has not been willing to engage in what I would perceive to be a thoughtful enough conversation about the conflict,” Ortiz-Cedeño says. “The issue of Palestine is going to be one of those that is a make or break issue for her. It has not been one that has been taken seriously enough by the party.”
Ortiz-Cedeño is not under the illusion that one candidate will address every policy issue she wants to see tackled by the president. But she believes it’s better than what former President Donald Trump has to offer.
“Trump has made it very clear what his intentions are with Palestine, and what his relationship is with [Benjamin] Netanyahu,” Ortiz-Cedeño says. “I understand the political strategy that many people are trying to engage in by withholding their vote, but I would also encourage them to re-engage in the political process.”
Casting her vote for Harris is a decision grounded in calculation rather than outright support. “I think I can vote in this election in order to have harm reduction… because I have deep care and concern for other communities that are going to be impacted by a Trump presidency,” Ortiz-Cedeño says.
She also hopes that American politicians will consider the nuance and perspective that Afro-Latinos bring to the table when it comes to politics, policy, and race in America, “When we don’t think expansively about who is Latino in the United States, the breadth of Latino experiences in the United States, we miss an opportunity to capture how diverse Latinos interests are politically.”
This story was reported in collaboration with PBS VOCES: Latino Vote 2024.
California Black Media
Ahead of Nov. Election, Event to Check Pulse of California’s Political Landscape
The Public Policy Institute of California is hosting a “2024 Speaker Series on California’s Future,” a preview event outlining the political landscape of the state and the nation ahead of the upcoming November elections. The event, which will be held Sept. 26 from 12 noon to 1 p.m., will include a panel of prominent political journalists who will assess the mood of the electorate and discuss themes and issues that are likely to shape the election outcome in November.
By Bo Tefu, California Black Media
The Public Policy Institute of California is hosting a “2024 Speaker Series on California’s Future,” a preview event outlining the political landscape of the state and the nation ahead of the upcoming November elections.
The event, which will be held Sept. 26 from 12 noon to 1 p.m., will include a panel of prominent political journalists who will assess the mood of the electorate and discuss themes and issues that are likely to shape the election outcome in November.
The welcome and opening remarks of the event will be led by Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the president and chief executive officer of the PPIC. The discussion will be moderated by FOX 11 news anchor Elex Michaelson, journalists joining the conversation include senior political writer Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle, national politics reporter Astead Herndon of the The New York Times, political correspondent for KQED Marisa Lagos, and senior political reporter POLITICO Melanie Mason.
A statewide survey by the PPIC revealed key findings that highlighted people’s concerns regarding candidates of choice for the 2024 presidential election, the 10 state propositions on the ballot, and the financial direction of the state in the next 12 months.
Since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party standard bearer, 6 in 10 California likely voters support the Democratic presidential ticket compared to the Republican party and other candidates.
“Californians’ support for the Democratic presidential candidate — and partisans’ overwhelming preference for their party’s candidates — were the consistent trends before Harris replaced Biden,” the survey report stated.
Among the 10 ballot measures, approximately 71% of voters are expected to vote yes on Proposition 36, allowing felony charges and increased sentences for some drug and theft crimes.
According to the survey, the majority of voters, “think it is a good thing that a majority of voters can make laws and change public policies by passing initiatives.” Voters agree that initiatives on the ballot, “bring up important public policy issues that the Governor and Legislature have not adequately addressed.”
The survey also revealed that nearly half of voters think the state and country are headed in the wrong direction and expect financial struggles in the next 12 months.
The event will be held at the Sheraton Grand Hotel in Sacramento.
The PPIC Speaker Series on California’s Future invites thought leaders and changemakers to address challenges in the state. Residents can visit the PPIC website for more information and register for the event available online and in person.
-
Alameda County5 days ago
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price Announces $7.5 Million Settlement Agreement with Walmart
-
Activism3 weeks ago
COMMENTARY: DA Price Has Done Nothing Wrong; Oppose Her Recall
-
Activism2 weeks ago
OP-ED: Hydrogen’s Promise a Path to Cleaner Air and Jobs for Oakland
-
Activism3 weeks ago
Barbara Lee, Other Leaders, Urge Voters to Say ‘No’ to Recalls of D.A. Pamela Price, Mayor Sheng Thao
-
Activism3 weeks ago
Oakland Post: Week of October 9 – 15, 2024
-
Community2 weeks ago
Terry T. Backs Oakland Comedy Residency by Oakland’s Luenell at Jimmy Kimmel’s Comedy Club in Las Vegas
-
Business2 weeks ago
Study Confirms California’s $20/Hour Fast Food Wage Raises Pay Without Job Losses
-
Activism3 weeks ago
Surge of Support for Vote ‘No’ on Recall of Mayor Sheng Thao
1 Comment