Recommendation to receive and file a report requested by Councilwoman Price from the California State University Long Beach Anthropology Department on their recent research and findings on the topic of Long Beach homelessness and outreach efforts.
Great. Thank you very much. And thank you, Stephanie, who is also obviously putting a lot of work into that. With that, let me move on to item number 16. Communication from Councilwoman Price, Vice Mayor Andrew's Council member. The recommendation to receive and file a report requested by Councilman Price from CSU L.B. Anthropology Department on the topic of Long Beach homelessness and outreach efforts. Thank you, Councilman Price. Thank you. For the record, this is not the debate portion yet. I am presenting the agenda item. So I'm so glad to be receiving this report today. So if we can have our Long Beach State students come down, I'd really appreciate it. It was over two years ago now that we began discussing this research and the important role it could play for addressing homelessness in Long Beach. I want to thank our homeless outreach team and the Health Department, as well as our quality of life officers in the police department and our heart units in the fire department for working so closely with these students to ensure their research and information was strong. Focusing on the incredibly difficult question of why some people experiencing homelessness refuse services could have a huge impact on the way we conduct outreach. It takes 17 interactions on average to convince and build the credibility with an individual to accept services. And those 17 interactions are over months and sometimes years and mean city staff has to spend time and work to conduct this outreach and to build that credibility, focusing on how we can reduce that number and tailor outreach to get people to accept the fantastic services we provide here in Long Beach not only helps individuals, but improves our community and could save us money for classes from Cal State. Long Beach's anthropology department worked on this project for over two years. Over 550 hours of outreach and field work went into this report. They had 487 documented outreach encounters. Information on the use of global tickets and their potential benefits to getting people into services was very interesting. They did interviews with service providers that we partner with as a city and provided details on various hurdles to getting into services that can be studied as a city as we look at making our services and our outreach more efficient. So I'm going to welcome our team from CSU. I'll be to the podium. I want to thank you for your patience tonight. The students got to see how democracy works and to be a part of that process. Thank you. Honorary Mayor and member of councils. AUDIENCE Good evening. My name is Mitra Baghdadi. I'm from Department of Anthropology at California State University, Long Beach. And with me, I have a department chair, Dr. Karen Quintilian. Two of our students, Acacia, Adel, Anton, know one and two of our undergraduate undergraduate students, Phenix, Pedro and Iris Salazar. Homelessness got my attention. And when the movement of not in my backyard started popping up on our news feed and I noticed substantial number of close consultation and meeting by city officials and police officers were being held in the different communities across this city and neighborhood, and it was a part of process of how to do that , increasing part of process to deal with, you know, increasing number of homeless individuals in the streets. Since I live in District three, I also work in District three in case State Longreach and I have witnessed how Constable Missy Price product proactively was working to address homelessness issues around the city. Therefore, I approached her with an idea of creating a project that is mutually beneficial partnership between City of Long Beach and Department of Anthropology in California State University. Long Beach. Addressing a critical issue like homelessness, which is very important for our city and community. Councilwoman Suzy Price as she mentioned, invited and introduced Dr. Quintilian and I at. And our idea of this collaboration to meet with. And Ms.. Ms.. Theresa Chandler, city manager. Bureau of Helping of Health Services. And also with Ms.. Shannon Parker, Homeless Officer, Service Officer in March of 2017. I want to acknowledge that both of them are here. Thank you very much. For two years of collaboration. They they've worked with our students very and the entire two years. And our students were very fortunate to basically get many guidance from their. We listen to some of their challenges and we discuss a plan to conduct conduct. Ethnography research. Councilwoman Suzy Pryce wanted to make sure the project is a city recognized project and is specifically wanted to make sure that our students get the recognition for working on this project with the city and experience that needed to get our project. And our research is focused on understanding why many individuals who are experiencing homelessness don't regularly take up services offered to them by the city or government service providers. We tried to understand this question from multiple perspectives. We tried individuals, including individuals who are currently receiving services with individuals who are refused services. And more importantly, we talked with the authority members who attempt to address each client unique circumstances. In past two years. Dr. Karen Quintilian and I, in anthropology department with 12 graduate student and 14 undergraduate students, worked on a collaborative research project with the Department of Health and Human Services based and many of the continuum of care partners including. Quality of life officers in the police department and health and and fire department, homeless education response team, heart team and many other service providers, including faith based organizations that they play a really important role of giving service to the homeless population in Longreach and. Six of us here. Yeah, six out of six of us here, we are presenting our research, the booklet you have in your hand. We divided our talk into different things. We promise we won't take time. That's much. I know. You have a long night. I would like to invite Dr. Quintilian to share some of our funding findings with you. Good evening and thank you, Mayor Garcia and council members. And it's really hard to follow a debate about how long a presentation should be. So I can assure you we did make sure we were, in a word limit. Just so you know. And with that in mind, I do want to really express, you know, sincere appreciation for making this possible to present these research findings on homeless outreach in our city. You know, with four of the key students that prepared this report, there were several other students involved that conducted the research that was described by Council member Susie Price in the number of hours that went into it. And I want to just point out some of those key findings and then invite them up to do a brief description of their research posters and some other key findings that they worked on as part of this report. I'd like to emphasize that this report is really meant for you to read as a whole, to really understand the inner workings of the street team. We examined the professional qualities and skills of this team in creating the conditions for service acceptance, both short and long term, and the hurdles they helped people overcome in that process. So I'm just going to outline for you to just, you know, cue up when you read the report, some of these key findings today. First, service acceptance is a continual process. Almost all of the 487 outreach encounters, documented and observed, led to the outreach team goals being achieved in one way or another. Building trust and rapport, for example. Assessing needs immediate and longer term. Determining eligibility. Acting as a liaison to service and guiding people through the hurdles to care. Second, multiple contacts between outreach team members and those experiencing homelessness is critical to under overcoming the lack of trust in, quote, the system that people may possess and believing that personal change is possible. Faced with hurdles, some people simply give up. Clients describe specifically accepting service as a matter of being ready, being able to meet service criteria. Finding a program that fits their needs. And having the support of people such as the outreach team to meet their goals. Third, as the frontline workers, the outreach team are responsible for addressing the hotline, calls and emails from the Long Beach community members. They use professional skills to negotiate and manage the needs of both the larger Long Beach community and people experiencing homelessness. They conduct outreach in a manner that fosters communication and trust. In that regard for the outreach team innovates to facilitate people experiencing homelessness to take the first step to accessing services. And lastly, further research is needed to identify how the factors that contribute to successful service acceptance can be adapted and how the hurdles to access to services or gaps in services can be addressed. The outreach team has critical knowledge and expertize in understanding both of these areas that can inform practices. And now I'd like to invite up the students just to share very, very briefly some of the highlights of their research posters. And thank you very much. Hello. My name is Ira Salazar. I'm an undergraduate student and I'm part of the anthropology department at Colby. I'm also part of the Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity Program, which is a mentor based research program. Which has given me the. Opportunity to be part of the homelessness, homelessness, ethnographic research and Education Lab. My part in the homeless outreach research was assisting in the data analysis and also writing the report that you are being provided today. My poster titled Let Them Get to that Place Understanding the role of outreach staff connecting homeless individuals to services focuses on the quality of the outreach members need to possess in order to effectively. Perform their jobs. And I encourage you to read pages four and five to learn on the report to learn more about the qualities outreach members need to have in themselves in order to effectively connect individuals to services. Thank you. Hello. My name is Phenix. Pedro and I will be graduating next week with my bachelor's degree in anthropology at Cal State Long Beach. And then in the fall, I'll be attending a Ph.D. program at Notre Dame University. My project in the here lab revolved around analyzing field notes in interviews to identify the types of obstacles or hurdles that individuals experiencing homelessness face while attempting to obtain services. Many of these obstacles are things like acquiring the proper documentation and identification in order to gain access to services. There are strict rules and regulations around services, insufficient amount of services, lack of transportation and lack of trust. These are the types of hurdles or obstacles that the outreach team assists people in overcoming when possible and when they are ready. And this can be seen in the barriers portion of the report on pages 16 and 17 in the report. And this research poster here, which is titled Barriers to Accessing Homeless Services in Long Beach, California, which is one of three that have been presented at multiple research conferences over the last year. Hello. My name is Tyne and I'm a graduate student in the Applied Anthropology Program at Cal State Long Beach. For my research, I honed in on looking at quality of life police officers to work with the outreach team. And what I learned was that they handle most, if not all, of the division service calls that involve people experiencing homelessness. It alleviate some of the pressure off of patrol units and helps the police department provide the most public, good possible quality of life. And the street team work together in coordinated outreach. The officers ensure the safety of the team and provides access to locations the team may not visit. Normally, enforcement is conducted very rarely and strategically. In my personal field work sample of 109 outreach interactions, only 15 included some form of enforcement, like a citation or arrest. Instead, the quality of life officers focused on building rapport, learning what their needs, the needs of the people they're meeting are, and figuring out how they can help the people they meet. There's a lot more detail on page nine that I invite you to look at. Thank you. Hello. My name is Acacia and Alan. I'm a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology. My contribution to this project was examining the transitional period between living on the streets and becoming housed and highlighting the lack of transitional assistance or retention services for individuals experiencing homelessness. It was while conducting this research that I became interested in homeless material culture. The items that individuals collect, keep and dispose of, and how they how they use these items to manifest their idea of home on the spaces that they occupy. Taking this as my thesis project, which is my poster right here. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, you guys, that was amazing. Amazing. First of all, I want to say this booklet that you've created is so dense with information. It covers so many different topics that we have studied here as a counsel in our study sessions on homelessness. It talks about housing. It talks about the importance of outreach. It talks about obstacles to getting into services like the lack of identification alone, just not having an ID. What that does for individuals who want a service. This document right here is just unbelievable. I mean, I'm going through it here. You talk about some of the legal hurdles we've had, some of the changes in the law and how that's impacted our homeless population. I really think you should apply for some sort of an award for this research project because this summarizes a lot of what we see every day, and it's just it's just chock full of information. So thank you. This exceeds any expectation I ever had when we first partnered. I mean, it goes above and beyond. And I just have to tell you guys, I wish I wish there were more people here to hear this presentation because this is unlike anything we've seen from it, especially from a college, you know, department with student labor. So thank you. And I want to thank our homeless outreach team. I've had the opportunity and feel incredibly blessed for the continuing opportunity to be able to join the Street team on some outreach efforts. And the work that the street teams do is just unbelievable. Anytime anyone reaches out to me about a not my backyard type issue, I say, Would you like to go on a homeless ride along? Because I think once they do, it really changes their perspective about what it takes to get someone into a service. So I just I'm so impressed by this, you guys. Thank you so much. You have no idea how valuable this is going to be for us in terms of policymaking and making informed decisions based on data. So thank you. Thank you. Vice Mayor Interest. Yes. Thank you very much. First of all, I want to thank Councilwoman the price for bringing this forward to our diocese, because what I'm seeing and you guys, first of all, I just want to tell you what a tremendous job you guys have done, because sometimes when I go out and speak to individuals, especially when dealing with homelessness and they're not homeless, and I speak in my various, you know, community groups, you talk about those people where you have put yourself in a position there to be a part of that. I have to give you kudos because the fact that I just can't even imagine what you went through to try to go to get the information that you have. Each and every one of you individuals, the job that you've done, it shows people that just not in the third district. Homeless is a worldwide problem. We have you. And I just want to thank Mrs. Price for bringing this forward. And I just wish we had more people here in the council to be able to see this, because you guys don't realize what a great job you're doing and the picture that you're showing to the community, to the city of Long Beach. Fantastic. And go beach. I just have to say that. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Ringo. Thank you, Mary. And I, too, want to extend my my, um, thank you to Councilmember Price for including me in this item. I had a a meeting a couple of weeks ago with the lottery, with Wetlands Authority, and there they have, as you know, a very serious homeless problem that goes into the wetlands and in those areas . You missed that meeting. But but I was there and we had a presentation done by the Quality of life officers from that Long Beach PD there. And what they basically brought forward was the fact that it it it can become a law enforcement issue, but it's a quality of life issue. And for many of those homeless individuals that were there, their compassion and their ability to communicate with the homeless people that were there was just absolutely phenomenal. They were able to have that those 15 or 17 point of contact, but more like ten or even less because they were they showed such an amount of of humanity to these individuals that it helped them reconnect with family, reconnect with society, get themselves cleaned up and get back into into the mainstream. And a lot of a lot of what we deal with with homelessness is not you know, we look at it as a law enforcement issue or maybe in an economic issue or socio economic issue, but it's a human issue. And if we are able to treat our fellow human beings more with more with greater sense of humanity, I think we would go a long way in addressing the homeless issues that we have in the city. But I was looking for the chief a little while ago because I want to get those names of those officers that that work in that area. Because they made a presentation that was just heartbreaking. I mean, it was it was it showed so much. Those guys really need a badge, not a badge. Merit medal for for all the work that they do out there, because they were doing phenomenal work in reaching out to these homeless people and getting them back into the into the mainstream to make them back into society. So this report here is absolutely wonderful. It basically documents what a lot of us already know. But you did the research and you did. You collected the data that just basically proves what we may already know or or perceive. And it's in it's all right here. So I agree with Councilmember Price that this could be a good policy document for us to look at and to determine what directions we want to take and where do we want to spend our money. And obviously, one thing that I can glean from this right now and how you worked already with with these other officers, is that we need to basically put a moral commitment into quality of life issues and quality of life efforts that would do a more direct outreach into the homeless community so that so we could bring in bring them back in, into society and connect them with their families and with the mainstream. So I want to thank all the work you've done. Thank you very much. Thank you, Councilwoman Mango. Excellent work. We have had the quality of life officers and the outreach team to many of our community meetings. But one of the things that I think is poignant is when a encampment is in a particular community, that's when the community adjacent is most open to understanding and listening and hearing the difference between perceptions realities. We have a lot of crossover jurisdictional issues between Long Beach City, Caltrans, L.A. County, who's in charge? When L.A. County, when Long Beach goes through to offer services. Oftentimes, they won't take the services till the day before the cleanup. How do we work on that efficiency? Is there an opportunity for us to work with, say, L.A. County so that they're noticing requirements match the adjacent city? Because one of the things that we consistently have as a challenge is as the city resource team goes around and meets with different individuals and cleans up those areas. They move to areas that have longer notice periods and then the neighbors who live adjacent to those area areas have different levels of frustration. And with that frustration comes a reduction in tolerance and compassion. And so we need to kind of be able to figure out and balance the ways in which we can interact and solve this as a whole. So I really appreciate this. I would love a digital copy so that I can do a better job sharing this with my network and our community leaders. I think that this is a great document as a starting point, but it also love to meet with any of you or all of you about your policy recommendations on how we could better pull together. Because I know in my district and actually in almost all of our districts, we have so many cross jurisdictional issues where it's, councilwoman, why can't you do something? And the area they're asking about is not within our jurisdiction. And then the frustration of where the funding comes from and how it can be used and what it can and can't be used for. Excellent work and we have a lot more work to do. So thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. Super now. Thanks. I'd also like to thank Councilmember Price for bringing this item forward. I agree. Just an awesome publication. Great job. I would say at the highest levels of professionalism, it's hard to believe this was done by students. I did see on page four that it's titled The Street Sharks. That has nothing to do with the new mascot for coastal languages. You know, I thought about that and I think we're all aligning here. So we're all we're all about the beach now. Okay. Well, President Connelly is going to be at my next community meeting at the end of the month. I'll make sure I point that out to her and to Teresa and Shannon, thank you for being here tonight. And we all know on the dais here how important they are. In fact, let me just say this. I never thought of your outreach team as sharks, but let's let's explore that a little bit. But the rapport with the council office is so key and because we communicate all the time. And so I just want to acknowledge that and thank you for assisting the group. And finally, Councilman Gonzalez. I just want to say thank you so much for your work. I see the methodologies that people really need to understand when we're out there reaching, you know, the most vulnerable of our populations. So thank you very much for this work. And also to Shannon and Teresa. I know you're amplifying a lot of their work. And oftentimes as a councilmember, when I'm explaining this to downtown residents, it doesn't come off very well. They're just thinking that I'm just, you know, not explaining it or they don't understand it or they don't believe me any of the above. But I think this will be a really good way to present it. And I would love to invite you to some of our meetings in downtown to just talk about this report. It would be really great to do that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Is there any other public comment outside the presentation? Please come forward. Can I get. Out? Let me go ahead, please. Let's do that. Actually, no, I mean, I meant one of the professor. Please come forward. And ma'am, please come forward also. I just want to emphasize then this. I we as a group and a department, we want to we really appreciate what it was offer to the collaboration, the partnership. It didn't cost that much, but what we gained was priceless. The experience of having our students in a real field, what we did in our class, we designed a class two way that our students, they study all of the, you know, logistic, all the city decisions, everything was happening in the city. And we went and we look at the news nationally and internationally. We let the students sit and do all the forms, one by one, to figure out what the homeless individual has to go to do good services. And then as a result of that, many of our students, our students, they presented their work in three national conference . One No national one of a student got the first prize in the post there they had in the very prestigious conference in anthropology. Well, we just want to thank all of you and say this kind of research. Basically, we are educating our students to be the agent of change in a community, and that's what we like to do. I know as educated as you are, looking forward to it to. Absolutely. Please come forward. Hello, counsel. My name is Nita Chopra. I am the community development coordinator of Mental Health America of Los Angeles. And we are based out of Long Beach here in the community. We have many. Programs targeting, you know, people of the homeless population today, which is our transitional age. Youth and even veterans actually came here specifically today to hear about the issue. I'll be anthropology department report. We have a two innovations, two grant funded projects through the Department of Mental Health that were approved this year. One is targeting transitional age youth within the Long Beach community who are homeless or at risk of being homeless. I came out here today to make you aware of this program that we have and to gain community partners going forward. Because as the anthropology department stated, it is all about connections within the community to make sure that we know of the resources that we have available to us to provide towards our. Members that we have. So I think it. I just wanted to let you know that we have our next collaborators meeting coming up next week on the 22nd at one of our community partners, the LGBT center of Long Beach. Again, this is for transitional age youth who are 18 to 25, who are homeless or at risk of being homeless, who have experienced some form of trauma from being homeless, experienced poverty, being a LGBTQ community. And we. Also have another one that is. Our Workforce Development Innovations grant, and that is for anyone 18 and over, and that is another sector that we are doing. And it is to provide. Stabilization for people's lives going forward, not just in our services, but past our services as well. At Mental Health America, our goal is to give people a life. We don't want to just give them a service and see them out the door. We want to give them stability and we want to give them a reason to move forward. So I invite you all, encourage you all, please to come to our collaborators meeting next week on the 22nd. And again, that is 12 to 2 p.m. at the LGBT center of Long Beach. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Brice. Thank you. I just have to end it. I want to thank Mental Health America and fact check. Cunningham from my team is going to reach out to you right now because we know that you guys also expressed an interest in our homeless work program that we're trying to roll out. So thank you for that. Thank you for all the partners to our Cal State Long Beach team. Thank you again for everything. You know what I love about this document here is a lot of time and I want to thank my colleagues. They started their comments with with a lot of thank you's, which is kind of customary. But what we do here but I just want to say there's no thanks to me. There was an opportunity for me to collaborate. And I love that this document here that you created is not political. It doesn't have a, you know, politicians logo on it. It's about you and your work product. And it's a document for us as policymakers to use. It's not any one person's initiative. It's not any one person's effort. This is something that's going to help the entire city. It's for all of us. So I brought the item tonight, but it could have been any of us. You did the work. So I want to thank you for giving us some tools. We're really lucky to have Cal State Long Beach in the city. I'm really lucky to have the university in my district and opportunities to partner on this cost us nothing. We didn't have to give money from the taxpayer dollars to commission the study. We didn't have you didn't have to have 100 people in here asking for money. You did this on your own because it's a research project that's going to enhance your students and it's going to enhance the city that the university is located in. And I wish we could have more endeavors and projects like this. So this is so positive. I'm very, very excited about it and I'm so grateful to our city staff for working with you and really driving this project. I just put it on the agenda. I didn't do any of the work. You did everything. So thank you. I think it Councilwoman. And I just wanted to close say, first of all, you guys did a great job. Amazing that this has been both graduate and undergraduate work in partnership. I think obviously you're doing this graduate level research and just really great. There's there's so many partnerships that the university has with the city, similar projects like this with other departments, whether it's engineering or the innovation work happening or with business. And so many projects where students are getting hands on experience and doing work that benefits one the city. But most importantly and I think your faculty got it exactly right, the the folks that are benefiting the most are the students that actually get to do the research that is applied. And it goes back into that classroom and that field experience that you're all getting. And so that's really exciting. And so congratulations. And with that, everyone, please cast your votes. We hope. Thank you again. Motion carries.