Back in 2018, Friends In Deed’s Street Outreach and Housing team was a fledgling program with only two employees. Friends In Deed House on Washington Boulevard was already bursting at the seams, so we rented a new office space on Lake Avenue. The tiny team painted the new open-plan office themselves, in FID green, and then generously shared it with our administrative and eviction prevention staff. The Street Outreach team’s job was to reach out to people experiencing homelessness where they were, on the streets, and start connecting them to services. Small but mighty, in the first few months they housed eight clients!
According to an article in Pasadena Outlook eight months later, Rabbi Joshua’s hopes for the future of the program were to grow it to six people, and to include housing navigators to help find affordable places for our clients to live. We also dreamed of an SUV to help move clients and their belongings to their new homes. But at the time, those hopes and dreams seemed almost unimaginably ambitious.
Six years later, the Street Outreach and Housing program employs seven full-time staff and a host of interns. Three of those staff are dedicated housing navigators, and we even have a licensed social worker! The team now occupies a whole suite of offices in the building on Lake Avenue, and they have their own vehicle to help with move-ins. In the last financial year, they housed 112 households!