Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Jessup.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Sarah. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I joined the Board of The People Concern in 2005 (then OPCC – 4 years ago OPCC on the Westside and LAMP Community downtown merged to form The People Concern). Two months earlier, my sister Elizabeth had finally succeeded in killing herself. Had I known then about OPCC, her fate might have been different.
Although she suffered with mental illness for decades, it was mid-2002 – when she was just shy of 40 years old – when she first began experiencing psychosis and it was the beginning of a very long end. She lost her job and her apartment; we were very lucky to find her a Section 8 apartment in Northridge – but she had no reliable social services or support. I became her de facto case manager, dropping whatever I was doing to run up there when she was in trouble or had another failed attempt at suicide.Ultimately, when she disappeared for two days, and I filed a missing person’s report and got a call from the coroner 30 minutes later that they had a Jane Doe in the morgue who had been hit by a train.
To me, that’s what housing without supportive services looked like to me, and why I remain so passionate about the work of The People Concern after almost a decade and a half. Although the agency has grown and changed so much over the years as the landscape of homelessness has changed, its mission to create a world where everyone is housed, healthy and safe never has. I am proud to have served as Board Chair of OPCC from 2010-2013 and am currently in my second year of chairing Board of The People Concern.
One of the things I am most proud of is The People Concern’s commitment to helping the sickest and most vulnerable in our community – the most chronically homeless suffering on our streets. They are experts at bringing people inside and keeping them housed. They achieves results and rates of success that far outpace national averages.
But even with these great services, the problem in LA continues to worsen, in part because of our desperate shortage of Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). Proposition HHH was passed to address this lack of housing, but it’s actually shined a light on a broken system: the current model of building costs over Five Hundred Fifty Thousand Dollars and can take 3-5 years to complete a supportive development in order to house one person. The system was clearly not designed to solve the problem we are in. We needed another solution and decided to take matters into our own hands.
A couple of years ago, I partnered with a fellow Board member of The People Concern and two other individuals to create FlyawayHomes. FlyawayHomes was founded on the principle that the only way to provide permanent supportive housing that could scale fast enough to solve our homelessness crisis is to create a replicable production model, and streamline the financing structure. The key is to reduce the cost and time of construction. Flyaway does this by building smaller, quality supportive housing by right, designed with shared living units, constructing them using manufactured housing and using a streamlined financing structure. We have created a production model that is small enough to integrate into any neighborhood and will soon start to scale up to build a few at once. Flyaway has just been recommended for $19.5 million in funding by the Mayor’s office from the City’s HHH Housing Innovation Challenge. We will leverage this funding with approximately $40 million from other capital sources to produce developments to house 400 people in 24 months. We would be creating 200 2-bedroom/2-bathroom units in approximately 5 developments across the City.
With the right components in place, we think we can house 20,000 by the time the Olympics come to Los Angeles in 2028. Wouldn’t that be amazing? We imagine a future when you can drive down a street almost anywhere in Los Angeles and not see evidence of street homelessness. We imagine a future when your neighborhoods are revitalized, your families feel safe, and your property values are soaring. We imagine a future when no person is forced to live in squalor on our streets, for years, without reasonable access to housing or services.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
That question makes me smile – most days it seems like everything about this work is hard!
On the Flyaway side, I tell my partners that if this was easy, everyone would be doing it.! Changing systems that have been built up over decades is the most difficult work there is. But I am very grateful to be working with a team who is remarkable, and we are all equally committed to seeing it through and paving the way to creating a way of building PSH in the timeframe Los Angeles needs to solve homelessness, at a price it can afford. We have gotten incredible shows of support from the community and are working hard to widen those circles because we know that in order for our mission to be successful, we need the support of all communities who are ready to support our solution.
On The People Concern side, the challenges change as the years go by and the Agency grows, but the one thing that doesn’t change is that private fundraising for homeless issues is extremely difficult work. The People Concern is not unique in that it tries to do as much as it can with as little as it can, like most non-profits working in this space. The staff that show up every day to do this difficult work are nothing short of heroic to me. And although it is poised to scale up alongside Flyaway to meet the increasing need to provide the intensive supportive services are provided tothat are essential for our housed clients to make sure they stay housed, it will have to carefully manage this growth in order to be successful.
In spite of all of the challenges, though, and usually when things seem most dire, something good happens and gives me the strength to continue on with the fight. Sometimes that something good is being able to spend time with one of our clients, who remind me that these are remarkable and courageous people who are pushing through their darkest days of their life story. Sometimes it is when someone steps up with a significant donation to The People Concern so that our staff can keep doing their amazing work to solve homelessness. And sometimes it is watching FlyawayHomes grow and get more press and support, from all corners of Los Angeles, from our housed neighbors who are ready for — desperate for — a solution and want to be a part of what we are doing.
What were you like growing up?
My parents were both born and raised in Manhattan, and we relocated to Los Angeles when I was six. I grew up as the youngest of four girls and had a stable but somewhat unremarkable childhood. I didn’t really engage with my education until college, and in high-school I hung out with the punk rock kids and I fancied myself a rebel. I was lucky to have amazing friends to hang out with, go to concerts with, and get into low-grade trouble with. I started working at a local law office when I was 16, and it was really my experience there that changed my path and motivated me to be more proactive academically so that I could excel in the work that I was doing and ultimately have a fulfilling career. I could have never in a million years imagined that I would be here, now, doing this work but I am incredibly grateful for my bumpy life that has led me here. I am very lucky, indeed.
Contact Info:
- Address: 2116 Arlington Avenue, Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90018 - Website: flyawayhomes.org; thepeopleconcern.org
- Phone: 310-437-7764
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flyawayhomesinc/; https://www.instagram.com/thepeopleconcern
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/flyawayhomes/; https://www.facebook.com/ThePeopleConcern
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/flyawayhomesinc; https://www.twitter.com/thepplconcern
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flyawayhomes-inc./; https://www.linkedin.com/company/thepeopleconcern/
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