Va Lecia Adams Kellum, photographed on the Los Angeles Occasions in El Segundo on Sept. 8.
When the cleanup of homeless camps in Venice three years in the past gave a megaphone to a flamboyant sheriff and created battle strains of opposing neighborhood activists, one measured voice emerged from the cacophony.
Va Lecia Adams Kellum, then the president and chief govt of Venice-based St. Joseph Heart, secured beds in close by motels and flooded the beachfront with case staff. As metropolis sanitation vans lumbered over the boardwalk behind her, Adams Kellum confronted the media, promising that each particular person can be moved however not earlier than every acquired a suggestion of a greater place to sleep.
Uncover the changemakers who’re shaping each cultural nook of Los Angeles. This week we deliver you The Civic Heart, a set that features a groundbreaking mayor, a housing advocate, a giver of meals and others who’re the spine of Los Angeles. Come again every Sunday for one more installment.
The monthlong marketing campaign grew to become the template for Inside Secure, Mayor Karen Bass’ program that has cleared out about 50 of town’s hardest encampments.
After serving to form that program as a member of Bass’ transition workforce, Adams Kellum, 58, took on essentially the most daunting job in L.A.’s fractured homeless companies system.
Chosen in March final yr as chief govt of the Los Angeles Homeless Providers Authority, Adams Kellum brings a robust persona and road expertise to an company that had been led by bureaucrats for almost a decade below intensifying calls for for it to be restructured and even dissolved.
‘We ought to be driving, which suggests main. We ought to be developing with strategic path.’
— Va Lecia Adams Kellum
The joint-powers authority conducts the annual homeless depend, distributes federal homeless funds, employs outreach groups and maintains the homeless database.
And but, regardless of rising a number of occasions over with ballooning metropolis and county funds, the company hasn’t been deeply concerned in developing with workable plans to get folks off the streets and into housing.
Adams Kellum mentioned she intends to vary that.
“This mission is fairly clear,” she mentioned. “We ought to be driving, which suggests main. We ought to be developing with strategic path.”
Her first yr has examined that resolve as she confronted bureaucratic sluggishness.
Pissed off with the quite a few contract amendments that sluggish reimbursements to service suppliers, she booted the authority’s chief monetary and knowledge officers.
“I requested the finance workforce, ‘Are you able to think about a time when we’ve got much less amendments?’” Adams Kellum informed the L.A. County Board of Supervisors throughout a listening to on the fee issues. “Sadly, a few of these folks aren’t with me any longer. I didn’t get a solution that I believed was what I ought to hear.”
She mentioned that’s just the start.
“I’m one yr into this position, and I didn’t construct this technique,” she informed the supervisors. “However I do know it should be rebuilt as a result of the struggling on the streets calls for it.”
