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I really liked him, the woman, who requested anonymity due to privacy concerns, said. In this case, unfortunately, our staff was not informed of the pregnancy by the resident or her partner during intake nor were there any noticeably apparent signs that the resident was pregnant, Tyler said. Training consists of two days in class, followed by a week in the field. The operator of the site, the nonprofit Urban Alchemy, has since moved on to open a homeless shelter in Lower Nob Hill and was recently granted a contract by the city to perform homeless outreach. The collectives co-founder, Aqeela Sherrills, called Urban Alchemy highly effective, saying it builds relationships, helps people with housing and reduces violence. Urban Alchemys performance the value of the interactions it has on the streets is difficult to measure. After Clark-Johnson, director of residential services, and Hammonds, chief of training, stopped coming to the camp on a regular basis, two Urban Alchemy employees, Mike and Joseph, whose last names are unknown, took over. Drugs arent Cooks only problem, according to the campers who have made other serious allegations against the employee. He wasnt trying to sell it., Mike drank a beer while working, according to Kennedy. Still, though Urban Alchemy said it doesnt recruit or advertise, it currently has more than 4,900 applicants. Steveo. In one altercation, Arthur Bruce, who is homeless and lives near the encampment, accused an employee of hitting him during an argument and sending him to the hospital with an injured wrist, an account backed by two friends who said they witnessed the encounter. They come through word of mouth, walk-ins, job fairs, online searches, and referrals from parole officers or other organizations. The three organizations are the inaugural members of the Austin Street Outreach Collaborative. Curating the best of The Standards top-notch reporting, every Saturday. I can attest to the fact the meth was real., Kennedy said he knows two Urban Alchemy practitioners who brought meth into the camp, although neither works at the Sausalito location any longer. Powelson said he reported drug use by Urban Alchemy staff to Josh, who was a shift supervisor. Hammonds sweeps up trash along Golden Gate Avenue in the Tenderloin. To that end, Urban Alchemy prioritizes hiring ex-convicts who have served decades in prison after being convicted of serious crimes, which can include murder. I did a line with an Urban Alchemy guy, Sarah Gossage, a current encampment resident, said. I looked on their website and it was hella vague. That "super power" is needed to work the streets of LA says Kirkpatrick Tyler, the Chief of Government-Community Affairs for Urban Alchemy. But for decades it was politically unpopular and considered radical. I heard it happening. The operator of the site, the nonprofit Urban Alchemy, has since moved on to open a homeless shelter in Lower Nob Hill and was recently granted a contract by the city to perform homeless outreach. All Rights Reserved. Cook was going to take her to the liquor store until Kennedy intervened and brought the woman back into the encampment. Employees get paid starting at $21 an hour and benefits, according to Urban Alchemys latest city contract. Steveo Cook, an Urban Alchemy staff member, told Kennedy he could bring in the really good meth.. Right now in the City of Los Angeles, it's a free-for-all, said Buscaino, who is a former LAPD officer. "They've been great," he said. In Sausalito, where city officials paid Urban Alchemy $464,000 to run a tent encampment for six months, a photo shows that a worker wearing shorts had a visible 88 tattoo on his right calf, a well-known code for Heil Hitler. (H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.) Del Seymour, a Tenderloin community leader, called Urban Alchemy phenomenal because it helped calm the streets without police and allowed the city to quickly open homeless shelters. The first apartments in Enlightenment Plaza are expected to open to residents at the end of 2022. Four homeless people told the Pacific Sun about Urban Alchemy employees who have brought methamphetamine into the encampment for their own use or to share with campers. Louie Hammonds, chief of training for Urban Alchemy, instructs new employees on the outreach program. Im going to fuck you up, Josh can be heard shouting in the first second of the video. This expansion, in Millers' view, is owed to an innovation that came out of her own study of trauma. If the conduct is egregious, which has happened, she said, the person is fired. Urban Alchemy works with long-term offenders, integrating them back into society in order to prevent them from experiencing homelessness. Fresh off tens of millions in local contracts, the Urban Alchemy founder now has her sights set nationwide. Davis made clear that homelessness is an experience, not an identity.. While campers who come into the lot will still be without permanent housing, Urban Alchemy CEO Lena Miller says this type of site can be a first step towards that goal. "I haven't had a dissatisfied customer yet," says Briggs. But another councilmember who plans to open safe camping sites, Joe Buscaino, says enforcement is part of the point. For Davis, we are all here to hold each other accountable to be our better selves.. Gossage, a current camper, said Josh visited the camp within the last couple of weeks and told her that he is working for Urban Alchemy at a San Francisco location. Employees dont always succeed in deterring violence. These types of skills, she says, equip Urban Alchemy workers for interacting with people who are having a traumatic time on the street. One organization the city is working with, Urban Alchemy, was founded to provide career opportunities for the formerly incarcerated. Ill say, Have a good day, sir, the trainee responded. In terms of getting to the other side of it, that's not my lane. sues owner of Tenderloin boba cafe linked to alleged theft operation for horror story health code, housing violations, Mayor London Breed vows to fight for more police officers in upcoming San Francisco budget talks, Your Privacy Choices (Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads). What are you going to say, Hammonds asked, when someone comes at you like this and calls you a snitch-ass motherfing police?. Mitch OFarrell, the city councilmember whose district includes both Echo Park Lake and the new East Hollywood campground, declined an interview. They told the class theyve been in jail, homeless and raped. Get the latest from KCRW in your inbox 3x a week. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Alejandro Sanchez, who is on the clean team explains their approach. Temporary housing for individuals, men and women with children. Youre using force, he said. All Rights Reserved. Give people the opportunity to take a shower, get them off the street, and give them a sense of hope and belonging., Another man, DJ Woods, agreed. The Urban Alchemy employee told police that Bruce had threatened him and that he pushed Bruce in self-defense. "You don't just pick stuff up and throw it away. The woman who spent time in the bushes with Josh had witnessed the incident and explained to the police what had occurred. Symptoms of post-incarceration syndrome include aggressive and antisocial behavior, a permanent, unbridgeable emotional distance from other people, panic attacks and recurrent nightmares, according to numerous studies and surveys. 2 stars. Urban Alchemy also prohibits predatory sexual behavior because of the power dynamics, according to Clinebell. A year ago, the Community-Based Public Safety Collective formed with the aim of creating national best practices and training for roughly 200 similar organizations nationwide. Audits by Galperin have shown that a yearslong effort to build 10,000 new subsidized apartments for formerly homeless people in the city has been slow and costly, with a typical project taking three to six years to complete and running as high as $700,000 per unit in some cases. He just gave it to me. Some campers were offended by several of Joshs numerous tattoos, which include white supremacist symbols. Additionally, UA has a policy that requires practitioners to maintain workplace boundaries, and that includes no fraternization, such as not hanging out at the work site while not on duty., Clinebell said that Urban Alchemy hasnt received any reports of staff using drugs at the Sausalito camp, yet he concedes someone has a memory of a person reporting at a Sausalito City Council meeting that Urban Alchemy staff were smoking weed.. He has ridden with the rails with modern-day hobos, witnessed seven prison executions, written extensively about serial killers including the Unabomber, Doodler and Zodiac, and covered disasters ranging from the Sept. 11 terror attacks at Ground Zero to California's devastating wildfires. The city formally announced its relationship with Urban Alchemy in a Feb. 16, 2021 online statement. You have to understand why people do the things they do, what it looks like and the process. On a recent morning, a couple of days before the parking lot in East Hollywood opened to its first campers, a few unhoused men stood on the sidewalk outside its mesh-covered fence. She escaped Florida after college and now lives in Sausalito with her Chiweenie and an assortment of foster dogs. Founded in 2018, Urban Alchemy is based in San Francisco, CA, and claims to be a workforce development agency that hires former convicts and also aims to rebuild urban areas by supporting those struggling with homelessness, addiction, and mental illness. A formerly homeless woman sued Urban Alchemy, saying employees asked her to leave U.N. Plaza while she prayed. Josh responded that he would take care of it. While an LA Homeless Services Authority spokesperson says that Urban Alchemys contract includes housing-focused case management, Miller says thats not her organizations speciality, and Urban Alchemy typically partners with other nonprofits for housing navigation. I know just about everyone in the city, she said. 'Urban Alchemy' responds to LA's homeless crisis 5 January 11, 2023, 8:41 PM Los Angeles is seeking answers to the homeless crisis. The best of what to see, hear, eat, do, and more. The CAOs report did not contain a detailed breakdown of costs, but according to city officials most of the budget goes to 24/7 staffing, and maintaining a one to 12 staff to client ratio at all times. He then clocked out, came back into the camp, and hung out., However, Mike was later moved to another Urban Alchemy location after being caught on cell phone video calling a woman at the Sausalito encampment a bitch and a whore.. Most of Urban Alchemys 1,100 employees have served life sentences in prison, but did serious self-work to get out from under their incarceration, according to its website. One reason the city cited for retaining Urban Alchemy was the amount of time the Sausalito police were spending at the camp. Urban Alchemy secured the bulk of its work during the pandemic. The citys homeless services department said shelters run by Urban Alchemy have had few issues and that the organization has met the terms of its contracts. Urban Alchemys contract to run the Sausalito site expires at the end of June. Since 2018, Urban Alchemy has grown to 1,100 employees in five cities, with projected revenue of $55 million for the fiscal year ending June 30, records show. Downtown Streets Team employs local homeless populations to clean community spaces in San Jose and San Francisco. Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing for four years and running the Homeless Street. It offers emergency shelter, basic services and connections to housing for 130 men. If you can paint lines on a sidewalk for the same cost that you can give someone the rent for an apartment, said Myers of the Legal Aid Foundation, I'm concerned that our city is making the choice to paint the lines rather than actually get people into housing.. In Sausalito, where Urban Alchemy was hired to guard a tent encampment occupied by former residents of boats that had been confiscated, media reports described meth use, pot dealing and sexual encounters and assaults involving Urban Alchemy staff. Reduce the number of homelessness-related calls to dispatch, in areas where the CART program's community-strengthening interventions have occurred. Security is something totally different. And then well be out of the way of all the looky-looers too, he said. She has taken these young men, embraced them, given them a job to do when they get out of jail.. He later bought her a sandwich, prayed with her, and took her to the Tenderloin Linkage Center. Business and city leaders have credited Urban Alchemy with making streets cleaner and safer. Many . The new sanctioned campground on Madison Avenue, off Beverly Boulevard, is a pilot program thats expected to be the first of several across the city. But there have been very notable setbacks in Urban Alchemys projects in the Bay Area and beyond that call into question the efficacy of this approach. . Miller became interested in public toilets, specifically their importance in ensuring the dignity of the homeless, but also their potential for jobs. In addition, three homeless individuals are suing the organization for civil rights violations by Urban Alchemy employees. Mallory Moench (she/her) and Kevin Fagan (he/him) are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Dillon said nobody else had achieved what Miller had in Bayview and Hunters Point. Helping with that transformational experience takes extensive preparation, said Lola Whittle, president of the Urban Alchemy board of directors. And unlike at the West LA VAs safe camping site, this one doesnt share a campus with various health care facilities, and campers dont have access to a special pool of housing rental vouchers like eligible military veterans do. At times, tension has escalated between Urban Alchemy employees and the people theyre tasked with helping. The police are brought in to offer deescalation training, helping to establish a relationship between law enforcement and employees of Urban Alchemy. ECHO's executive director, Matt Mollica, said Urban Alchemy has been active in training opportunities and expanding on-the-ground outreach. Hammonds admitted that such incidents have occurred, despite training that if you put your hands on someone, you lose your job.. We can help them recruit. Los Angeles is seeking answers to the homeless crisis. This comes one month after LA officials cleared what was one of the citys largest encampments a makeshift community of nearly 200 tents, an outdoor food pantry and a shower stall that spanned the popular near-mile loop around Echo Park Lake just two miles away. Organizers believe those successes are possible because many were once homeless themselves and use that experience to make connections. We dont have anything that says Security. We call ourselves practitioners.. I like them, Ken Kennedy, a camper who is in the process of leaving the Sausalito encampment, said. And Ive been here for 87 damn years in this community, she said. Miller said this transforms the paradigm of how the police see us, and how everyone in society sees us.. But at Urban Alchemy, their skills are sought-after. Urban Alchemy has helped me to learn to help myself, Paradox said. They offered similar services in San Francisco since 2018. The ARCH is a City-owned facility providing shelter and resources in downtown Austin, managed by Urban Alchemy and Austin Area Urban League. We collaborated with everyone from the homeless to local business owners to unite the community and clean up the area. Bayron Wilson, Urban Alchemys director of operations, says the Sausalito allegations were false, and that the organization did a successful job helping the campers, who had just been kicked out of floating homes anchored in Richardson Bay. Hammonds helps a woman in distress out of the middle of Market Street. Miller noted how the work provides not only an income but also a sense of pride, remarking on an anecdote where one employee called the Governor of California into a bathroom stall he had just cleaned to show him how clean it was. I was in a vulnerable situation, she said. Prison is characterized in stacks of psychological research papers as a mental illness incubator where violence, deprivation and nihilism distort social skills and undermine inmates social compasses, sometimes resulting in a PTSD-like disorder called post-incarceration syndrome. But their employers, he stressed, must make sure they have stable housing and support including treatment for mental illness or addiction if needed to succeed. At the end of the day everybody has to have respect you know? Urban Alchemy provides four core services: community engagement and outreach, interim housing, hygiene services, and street-cleaning services. Low cost affordable housing for individuals and families. In Los Angeles, homeless advocates accused Urban Alchemy, which was hired on a six-month, $350,000 contract to offer shelter to people living at Echo Park Lake, of acting as an arm of law enforcement to clear encampments. The class laughed. And this is not easy., According to a report by the City Administrative Officer, the cost of the new East Hollywood campground runs approximately $2,663 per person per month. The lawsuit, which also names the city as a defendant, is ongoing. of SF politics and culture. Despite skepticism from some homeless advocates, Urban Alchemy sees its separation from law enforcement as central to its mission. Ian Clark-Johnson and Loving Lou Hammonds told the campers they came to help and make them more comfortable. Kirkpatrick Tyler, Urban Alchemy's chief of community affairs said in a statement that Perry was a long-time employee of another nonprofit homeless agency called Five Keys and was recently hired at Urban Alchemy. We dont have weapons, mace. The developer, a former city redevelopment official and executive with the homeless services organization PATH named John Molloy, is loaning the parking lot to the city for free in the meantime for its safe camping site. No one wants to touch that kind of liability.. Plan to fight education inequity in LA: Whats it achieved in 2 years? If you are in need of emergency shelter, please contact the Union County 24 Hour Homeless Emergency Response Hotline at 2-1-1. The organization holds $62 million in contracts in San Francisco while also providing homeless services in a half-dozen cities. If you have no self-control, no discipline, or choose to take it personally, he said, this is not the job for you.. Councilmember Ward is the chair of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, an integrated array of stakeholders committed to preventing and alleviating homelessness., Dispelling myths about who the homeless was paramount to all three speakers, but Elliott highlighted that in San Diego, the cause is primarily economic. When youre trying to prevent theft, who do you hire? One organization the city is working with, Urban. Id rather see Urban Alchemy than the cops.. Campers can bring in their own tents and whatever other belongings fit inside their assigned space. In short, well be handing this matter to our attorneys if the story names any UA employee who has been alleged to have committed any of the infractions she [Silverstein] lists, Clinebell wrote. An hour after the interaction with Snider, Hammonds rolled a woman in a wheelchair out of the middle of Market Street, where she was screaming and refusing to move, and into a cafe. He noted that a hospital bill they could not pay, a utility bill they could not pay, balanced with housing, especially in a high-cost market with low vacancy rates, leads to homelessness., The City of San Diego unanimously passed the Community Action Plan on Homelessness, a body of policy focused on helping the existing homeless population, preventing future homelessness, and ensuring that homelessness is an experience that is brief and non-recurring. Although the pair mentioned they were with Urban Alchemy, Powelson said the men gave the impression they were homeless advocates from San Francisco. The Lee County Homeless Coalition reports 394 people were homeless on the night of Jan. 26, 2021 when volunteers fanned the community to conduct the annual "point in time" surveys, according . Urban Alchemy started back in 2018. Employees report figures on their interactions after each shift. of SF politics and culture. But some advocates worry that officials are investing too much in The Armenian American community has been active in demanding for the United States to be on the right side of history, says Shant Sahakian, executive director of the After years of debate, Californias State Board of Education voted last month to adopt an ethnic studies model curriculum for K-12. Urban Alchemy said its employees de-escalated 54,000 potentially dangerous situations in the Tenderloin and Mid-Market by calming a mental health crisis or preventing a fight, for example, during the 10 months ending in April. Urban Alchemy first came to Los Angeles in 2020 as part of an effort to provide showers, handwashing stations, and cleaning to Skid Row. 0. The situation came to a screeching halt after another Urban Alchemy employee told her Josh was taking time off work because he was getting married that weekend. (The federal government already operates a similar site on the West LA Veterans Affairs campus in Brentwood.) Copyright Weeklys All rights reserved. In San Francisco, the organization is being paid $11.8 million over two years to work in the Tenderloin including $3 million from UC Hastings College of the Law, which is located in the neighborhood. In November of last year, the city awarded Urban Alchemy $2.6 million to lead a pilot program called CIRCLE, "Crisis and Incident Response through Community-Led Engagement." Some critics accuse the workers who are not state-licensed as private security guards of improperly policing public spaces. Clark-Johnson and Hammonds came back several times. She previously covered immigration and local news for the Albany Times Union and the Alabama state legislature for the Associated Press. The organization has created 24 safe and clean public toilets in Tenderloin and other parts of San Francisco with high homeless populations and given homeless individuals jobs cleaning and maintaining those toilets, BART stations, the Civic Center area, downtown streets, and parks. Miller attributed some lawsuits to growing pains as the group expanded without infrastructure it has now built and said others were bulls., Urban Alchemy grew fast and you make mistakes along the way, Miller said, adding that if there were real or serious complaints, we wouldnt have grown so fast. At about midnight on Jan. 7, 2022, the fire department responded to a report that a stillborn baby was found in the portable bathroom of a tent village referred to as a Safe Sleep Site.. Homelessness remains a core focus of his, close to his heart as a journalist who cares passionately about the human condition. In a Market street building, Louie Hammonds a former gang member who served 21 years in prison for attempted murder and is now Urban Alchemys chief of training role-played scenarios on the streets. 5 stars. Los Angeles is seeking answers to the homeless crisis. Know Your City! Kirkpatrick Tyler, who is in charge of government and community affairs for the organization, describes the past prison experience of Urban Alchemy workers as parallel to the story of every single superhero in every comic book that youve ever readthat they have a traumatic experience, [and] they have to make sure that traumatic experience has a sustainable transformational impact on who they are to their core.. And outsourcing government functions to nonprofits can make it more difficult for the public to evaluate whether spending is achieving results. So we don't want to pick up anything that's theirs," says Sanchez. Joseph gave me a quarter ounce of weed. No arrests have been made in either case. Miller became a board member last month. To date, Downtown Streets Team has secured over 1,900 jobs and homes for people. Urban Alchemy asserts that spending 20+ years in a confined environment teaches instincts that cant be learned in a classroom, making their practitioners uniquely qualified to work with homeless people. Urban Alchemys turnover rate from April 2021 to April 2022 was 32.6% higher than the 14% rate in a nonprofit survey conducted by Nonprofit HR, a national human resources firm, in 2020. Was the conspiracy theory label used too early? In training, Hammonds taught the new employees to be patiently persuasive when asking people who may be homeless, addicted or traumatized to stop blocking sidewalks or using drugs in public. For Urban Alchemys Executive Director Lena Miller, the organizations rapid San Francisco expansion is just the beginning. If our 100% San Francisco journalism helps you make sense of your city's changes and crises, please make a tax-deductible donation . The first step of the plan calls for transitioning away from using the police as a first point of contact and instead reaching out to social workers. Transitional Housing. She has acknowledged relationships that go back years with city power brokers, including Breed and former Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru, now charged with corruption. Several co-located agencies offer case management, job placement services, legal . San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Lauren Hepler and Chronicle photographer Stephen Lam contributed to this report. Our people tell the rest. Urban Alchemy offers four core services designed to meet the needs of the people and places in the communities we work. On top of that, the city is also reeling from the rapid rise of housing costs and government cutbacks on social services. Council is set to vote July 28 on a $4.14 million agreement with Urban Alchemy that would establish the nonprofit as the ARCH's operator for 13 1/2 months. Urban Alchemy launched in 2018, training the formerly homeless or incarcerated to de-escalate conflict, respond to overdoses and foster connection on the streets The CIRCLE pilot is part of $1 billion the city will spend confronting the homeless crisis this year We dont have a badge. Crime has gone up in America, the same old solutions are not working, so were going to see more growth in these areas and there are going to be growing pains, said Jorja Leap, an adjunct public policy professor at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, who is the lead researcher for Bidens efforts and was not involved in the Echo Lake Park report. The only reason why were where we are is because we get to work. Some unhoused people and their advocates, including Tracey Mixon, a formerly homeless Tenderloin resident who works with the Coalition on Homelessness, complain that some employees have gotten verbally or physically aggressive to make people move or stop problematic behavior. Her group has gone from providing monitors for Department of Public Works toilets and supplanting the police in various capacities Downtown to potentially taking on new roles as a San Francisco 911 first responder team and the operator of a network of government homeless camps in Portland. In San Francisco, a shooting early last year highlighted workers role in the line of fire as private patrols paid with city funds. The site closed in June 2022 after operating for a little over two years. Urban Alchemy notified the city on May 9 that they wouldnt be entering a new agreement, according to Urban Alchemys media representative. Los Angeles is seeking answers to the homeless crisis. SFs most important stories, delivered straight to your inbox, Urban Alchemy employees pick up trash, while homeless people gather belongings in the Tenderloin. that person was later asked by a UA director for details on the remark, and no details were provided, Clinebell wrote. envisions eventually helming a nationwide homelessness organization, permanent, unbridgeable emotional distance, role in the line of fire as private patrols paid with city funds. Urban Alchemy made their first contact with Sausalito's homeless residents on Feb. 13, 2021, about two months after the first tent was pitched, according to Robbie Powelson, a former Sausalito camper and president of the Marin Homeless Union. The idea of providing designated areas for unhoused people to camp, with bathrooms and access to social services, isnt new. All Rights Reserved Homelessness Rate: 0.93%. That was predatory. I believe it provides a good service for the community, said one, who only gave his first name, Eugene. Urban Alchemy has helped me to learn to help myself, Paradox said. Mara Paradox, a nonbinary exhibition artist hired months ago, was in their second training after they relapsed in drug use and went back into rehab. I mean, Ive been to prison, but you cant even make up the stories of what we see.. To do that legally, courts have said, city officials first must provide alternatives. Most of the calls involve people experiencing homelessness, in some cases drug use. An increasingly bipartisan chorus is asking where all the money goes for the states homeless crisis. Were stunned with the insensitivity of calling our workforce mercenary, especially since our practitioners are primarily Black, Latino and formerly incarcerated or homeless, Miller said. Start your review today. As the Bayview Vehicle Triage Center reaches is first anniversary, questions remain over its success in meeting SFs shelter needs. The entitys core philosophythat long stints in prison can equip a person for handling crises in the streetsis a selling point that seems to run counter to mainstream psychology.