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 The Homeless Activist Luncheon

Community Efforts in Santa Barbara to End Homelessness


DRAFT MAY 2023 UNFINISHED

So many spiritual activists in Santa Barbara have taught me what I know about the practicalities of transformational politics and social justice work.  UCSB Professor Dick Flacks, campus radical and social movement intellectual, was one of the reasons I moved to Santa Barbara to do graduate work over 30 years ago and I still draw inspiration from his example.  The theology of change I advance emerges from my direct experiences as an activist and community organizer focusing on ending homelessness in my community.  

I suffer from some mental health challenges which have left me homeless multiple times in the past 15 years.  While my time on the streets or living in shelters is relatively brief compared to many, those experiences allowed me to bear witness to social injustice through coming to know many beautiful people whose lives were very difficult and often very short. Even in a community as small as Santa Barbara (100,000 people) there were years in which a death of a person experiencing homelessness happened almost once a week.  As a formerly homeless person, working as a social worker doing street outreach, I often knew these people. 

In 2007 I began to attend the Homeless Activist Luncheon, hosted by Chuck Blitz and Cath Webb, which introduced me to a group of concerned community change agents,. When I started I was working for the Safe Parking Program, run by New Beginnings Counseling Center, and Gary Linker, the agencies executive director paid his staff to attend.  The event was held at 101 Mesa Lane, a beach-front property with five old homes on it, which used to be the Beach Boy property.

This bi-monthly get-together of community activists and service providers provided me with a hospitable setting for learning about homeless issues locally and meeting many of the key players—including the late Roger Heroux (who was then Director of Bring Our Community Home, the county's ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness), County social worker Ken Williams--a 30-year veteran of street outreach, and Dr. Lynne Jahnke—a local physician also active in street outreach who provided medical supervision to the event). 

Others who participated included Jennifer Faerrez from CARES (our county's mental health outreach providers), Alice Villa-Redit from the Housing Authority, Dana Gamble from Healthcare for the Homeless, Shaw Talley from the Safe Parking Program, and Gary Linker from New Beginnings Counseling Center.



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