Client story

    An urgent call came through to the Street Outreach and Housing team from the Food Pantry. A deaf young man had come in, clearly needing help, but unable to communicate his needs. As it happened, two team members were out on the road and swung by the pantry. They began communicating with the […]

Lee had been in sober living for a year, but he timed out of the program without having found a place to live, and he ended up back on the streets, mostly living in his car in safe parking facilities. The Friends In Deed Street Outreach and Housing team became involved, and worked with Lee

Dan has a PhD – and ADHD. He’s extremely intelligent, but many of the executive function tasks other people take for granted – paying bills, taking out the trash, cleaning the house – are often beyond him. In the second of our series of fictionalized accounts of the barriers people experience to getting housing, we’ll

Transitioning someone into housing is never as simple as just handing them the keys – and the barriers our clients face are as varied as the people themselves. Here, we begin a new series of fictionalized accounts that illustrate some of the very real challenges our clients have to overcome in order to get a

Wanda (pictured here with Director of The Women’s Room Lindsey) is one of our “new brand” of clients in The Women’s Room – articulate, high-functioning women who never expected to be in the position of needing our services, but whose lives were knocked off balance by the pandemic and who have struggled to get back

Our Food Pantry team did an amazing job of adapting the way the pantry ran during the pandemic – pivoting to offering safe services outside. But there’s no getting around the fact that the temporary system offered our clients less in the way of choice and flexibility than we like to be able to give.

The Program Associate on the staff of The Women’s Room, Jenny, is bilingual in English and Spanish – a great benefit to the smooth operation of that program. And, with her consistent presence, we are finding the Hispanic cohort among our TWR guests is growing and blossoming into a supportive sub-community that brightens the program

After having lived at George’s father’s ranch about a decade ago, George and Alicia made the choice to move south to be closer to Alicia’s family in Pasadena. They had savings, and were confident that George – an experienced construction worker – would soon find a job to support their young family. Unfortunately it didn’t

We’ve talked before about “Rose” a high-acuity client who has been living on the streets for 20 years. Some years ago she was walking down the street when she ran into Friends In Deed’s pantry director, Tim, who happened to be a former neighbor of hers. Tim told her about Friends In Deed, and Rose

Street Outreach team members Angel and Olivia were out on the streets when they came across the Bennett family in their packed car near the Lincoln motel. Olivia offered them some of the sack lunches that are so kindly provided for us by Throop Unitarian Universalist Church, and got talking. She discovered that the family