LOST ANGELS Community – Your Help Needed Today!
Our angel with the beautiful voice, Linda Harris, has suffered several serious setbacks to her health. Linda is now in a wheelchair and completely blind. She still lives at LAMP Lodge, but in a second floor apartment, with no elevator, and her only way out for important medical appointments is to sit and bump down one step at a time. Fortunately, the “love of her life,” Robert, is doing his best to care for Linda, but it is simply not enough. As you might imagine, all of this has taken a toll on Linda’s mental health as well.
As we write, the folks at Housing Works are working hard to get Linda an accessible, affordable apartment and LA county approval for in-home care. In the meantime, we are seeking donations to hire temporarily in-home caregiver for Linda who can assist with her daily needs, take her to doctor’s appointments, pick up prescriptions, and generally make sure that Linda is safe and well cared for. Our goal is to raise $2,500 to cover this cost until her county services kick in.
Please help a “Lost Angel” by making a donation today!
NOTE: Please specify LINDA HARRIS on the memo of your check, or if donating by credit card or Pay Pal, under the section marked “Special instructions to seller” when you review your donation. All donations are tax-deductible. Thank you!
Checks may be sent to:
Housing Works
1277 N. Wilcox Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
To donate using a credit card or Paypal, visit:
http://www.housingworksca.org/give.html
GET INVOLVED
Lamp Community is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization that permanently ends homelessness, improves health, and builds self-sufficiency among men and women living with severe mental illness. Their program is featured in LOST ANGELS as well as the Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. film THE SOLOIST.
Lamp achieves one of the highest success rates in the nation for ending homelessness – more than 85% of the people we house stay housed for one year or more.
What They Do: We help people living with severe mental illness move from streets to homes. Lamp offers immediate access to affordable, safe and permanent housing without requiring sobriety or participation in treatment. Once settled in their home, new tenants are surrounded with customized services such as mental health treatment, drug recovery, healthcare, budgeting, visual and performing arts, job opportunities, and other supports to help them achieve their goals and become a part of their community.
How They Do It: The approach we use, and helped to pioneer, is called Housing First or permanent supportive housing. Conventional wisdom has long said that homeless people with disabilities had to “straighten up” before they could obtain housing. But people with severe disabilities cannot access treatment, let alone make dramatic changes in their lives, while struggling to survive on the streets.
Lamp treats housing as a prerequisite for coping with the debilitating challenges of mental illness, addiction, physical disability, chronic disease, and the trauma associated with 5, 10, even 20 years of homelessness.
Customer choice is central to all of our services. Historically, people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other serious mental illnesses have been denied a voice in decisions that affect their lives. But Lamp knows that personal choice is paramount to success in treatment and in all aspects of one’s life.
Learn more at lampcommunity.org and Get Involved! (link: http://www.lampcommunity.org/index.php)
Our mission is to strengthen communities to end homelessness by building partnerships, sharing innovations, and connecting vulnerable people to homes and support.
Vision: Homelessness is a preventable condition and we believe resolving it is key to creating healthier communities. We envision communities where everyone has a home, the support of caring neighbors, and opportunities for a healthy, promising future.
Our perspective on homelessness is based on twenty years of experience ending street homelessness, developing and operating permanent supportive housing and bringing a range of community partners together to create and share cost-effective solutions to support our most vulnerable neighbors.
As results-oriented social entrepreneurs, we are fueled by optimism, driven by data, and convinced that powerful ideas linked to the efforts of a network of partners can solve urgent, complex and costly community challenges.
Strategy: What others might see as the toughest problems, we see as the highest-leverage opportunities. We focus on people and places facing the most complex challenges, where effective solutions can have the widest impact on health and housing outcomes, practices and policies.
Learn more about
cmtysolutions.org and Get Involved!
