The Shower of Hope

County of Los Angeles

Los Angeles is home to one of the largest communities of individuals experiencing homelessness; when people lose a home it’s more than the loss of a roof over their heads. For many, experiencing means losing access to sanitation and hygiene, which leads to a lack of self-worth and lowered sense of dignity which in itself creates another obstacle towards ending their cycle of homelessness.

With the Shower of Hope, we believe in the importance and power of having access to a shower for not just sanitation and health purposes, but in building a sense of self-respect and dignity that is critical to building a path out of homelessness. Working within the communities we operate in, we ensure that every unhoused guest who comes to our shower sites has access to meals, clothing, showers, hygiene items, and most importantly, case management. Through our 25 community resource hubs, rather than an unhoused individual having to navigate a difficult network of public transportation and service centers, our community hubs serve to bring the services, hygiene and dignity to our unhoused Angelenos. A $100,000 grant would allow us to open two new community resource hubs in service deprived areas of LA County allowing us to serve an additional 80 Angelenos weekly.

Applying a proven model or solution to a new issue or sector (e.g., using a job recruiting software or strategy to match clients to supportive housing sites, applying demonstrated strategies from advocating for college affordability to advocating for housing affordability and homelessness, etc.)

Since our launch back in 2017, we have expanded operations across LA county and the wider Southern California region to provide services to our neighbors experiencing homelessness. At over 3,000 showers a month, we have provided 36,000 showers to individuals experiencing homelessness in 2020 in the wider LA region. Despite these numbers, we know there is work to do to continue to provide direct access and care for Angelenos experiencing homelessness. LA2050, by helping us fund 2 new shower sites, can help expand access to those 66,000 individuals. In the long term when our work is successful, we will be able to not only provide individuals experiencing homelessness with showers, but dignity that showers can entail. Through our community engagement, we believe that our shower sites can become a critical spoke in connecting case managers with individuals experiencing homelessness to build an effective solution towards ending homelessness in our county.

As of the first quarter of 2021, we have partnered with Occidental College’s Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice to examine the impact and well being of guests at 6-7 of our shower sites in order to fully gauge their behavior and the impact of our services. We measure a wide range of KPIs to understand and measure success in the following areas: Distance travelled to attend a shower site Self-reported satisfaction before and after a shower Reported statements on next action (e.g. are you going to see a case manager after the shower?) We also measure success by daily showers provided at each side in order to gauge how many individuals we are able to provide showers with on a daily and monthly basis. We want to ensure that we are setting our Organization up where we are truly needed and where we can meet our unhoused neighbors who have been overlooked.

LA is the healthiest place to CONNECT