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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. Ian came up to me and said, Why did you throw us under the bus with that? Powelson said, referring to Clark-Johnson, Urban Alchemys residential services director. Some of these guys have got power trips, and they get pushy, but these guys here had the right thing going just now, Snider 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. Entry level positions for Urban Alchemy, like the Clean Teams, have become a familiar site in downtown Los Angeles, Venice and Hollywood. Urban Alchemy a relatively new organization primarily employs people of color coming out of prison and last year topped 1,000 employees. The organization conducted a review of its policies in response to the incident, Tyler said. At times, tension has escalated between Urban Alchemy employees and the people theyre tasked with helping. I did a line with an Urban Alchemy guy, Sarah Gossage, a current encampment resident, said. Miller became interested in public toilets, specifically their importance in ensuring the dignity of the homeless, but also their potential for jobs. While it hires people convicted of violent crimes, it doesnt employ registered sex offenders or people convicted of sexual assault. Each response includes a licensed mental health worker. Few people know how to withstand the trauma and chaos we see on the streets its usually those who have endured it themselves. 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. Get the latest from KCRW in your inbox 3x a week. Once the city increased the contract, we got all these new Urban Alchemy people coming and going, Powelson said. Nothing that we have [achieved] is based on corruption or cheating or something unethical or immoral, or illegal. A third organization, Urban Alchemy, is based in California and is hiring staffers for Austin. Very charismatic. We can help them recruit. The San Francisco Standard. If our 100% San Francisco journalism helps you make sense of your city's changes and crises, please make a tax-deductible donation . All rights reserved. The first apartments in Enlightenment Plaza are expected to open to residents at the end of 2022. The . The San Francisco Standard. The organization holds $62 million in contracts in San Francisco while also providing homeless services in a half-dozen cities. Louie Hammonds, chief of training for Urban Alchemy, instructs new employees on the outreach program. Urban Alchemy has helped me to learn to help myself, Paradox said. Shes just mad because I wont let her suck my dick, Josh said to the police, according to two campers. She escaped Florida after college and now lives in Sausalito with her Chiweenie and an assortment of foster dogs. On any given day, the employees of Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit that puts civilians on the sidewalks to address street-level issues rooted in addiction, mental illness and homelessness, might discourage someone in San Francisco from shooting up in public. 0. 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. 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. Wounded Warriors opened its first residence for homeless veterans, called Alpha House, at 1361 Fifth Ave. N. in the city of Naples in January 2020. When a neighborhood, street or intersection earns a reputation as a place to avoid, we turn it around. No one wants to touch that kind of liability.. 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. Plans for continuing education such as computer and financial literacy are also in the works, the organization said. The people that complain and dislike the homeless for whatever reason.. Alejandro Sanchez, who is on the clean team explains their approach. (The federal government already operates a similar site on the West LA Veterans Affairs campus in Brentwood.) 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. Students also learn that disrespect, defiance, doing drugs and showing up late will make you unsuccessful at Urban Alchemy, Hammonds said. After being hired to guard and provide other services to homeless encampments in the Los Angeles Skid Row neighborhood, workers became associated in the citys progressive media with a decision to evict homeless people from a downtown park. Thats higher than what a typical one-bedroom apartment rents for in the city, according to the website Rent Cafe. But Millers 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. In February, Miller said, a drug dealer shot an Urban Alchemy worker who had told the dealer to stop selling outside a city-run tent encampment. With this setup at the camp, you have males preying on vulnerable women.. Urban Alchemy offers four core services designed to meet the needs of the people and places in the communities we work. Homeless Population: 8,124. Urban Alchemy officials reject that characterization, saying they told Los Angeles officials they didnt want police involved in outreach to the unhoused and didnt coordinate with officers during sweeps. My lane is this part. LA has a well-documented shortage of affordable and subsidized apartments. 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. So far, cities are willing to take the risks. The woman who spent time in the bushes with Josh had witnessed the incident and explained to the police what had occurred. For longtime Bayview resident Yvonne Dillon, the nonprofits Miller has founded have been a blessing for the area because they provided jobs for people who had a hard time finding work. We have to have wrap around services but we also have to have a compassionate informed connected engagement mechanism and I believe that the work of CIRCLE is a part of that mechanism," explains Tyler. In addition, three homeless individuals are suing the organization for civil rights violations by Urban Alchemy employees. 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The nonprofits unusual slogan is No fuckery., What were trying to do, co-founder and CEO Lena Miller said in an interview, is just make spaces safe and clean and raise the vibration, so to speak, in areas that in the past have been dirty and scary, particularly for people who are vulnerable.. A majority of employees are people of color, and some have been homeless. Camp residents want to move on, hopefully to housing opportunities with the County of Marins assistance. A UA employee fucked [a female camper] in the tent next to the tent Im in, Deschamps said. After the Pacific Sun revealed the names of Urban Alchemy staff who the campers allege participated in drug use and sexual predation, Clinebell responded with an email to two of the papers editors. At the ASLA 2019 Conference on Landscape Architecture in San Diego, Brian Elliott, policy analyst for San Diego Councilmember Chris Ward; Brandon Davis with the California-based Downtown Streets Team; and Lena Miller with Urban Alchemy, discussed strategies to reintegrate homeless individuals into their communities, ranging from top-down policy decisions to empowering local unsheltered populations through employment options. Not even base metal. It can't be the type of offer that leads to criminalization and displacement and the shutting down of other public spaces, said Shayla Myers, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. The few people who remained on the block stayed out of the middle of the sidewalk and tried to keep any drug use out of view. Including them as part of the community helps ensure norms are met. At the July 28 City Council meeting, all but two members voted to hand over operations of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH) to Urban Alchemy.. That's the California-based . Urban Alchemy first came to Los Angeles in 2020 as part of an effort to provide showers, handwashing stations, and cleaning to Skid Row. Urban Alchemy works with long-term offenders, integrating them back into society in order to prevent them from experiencing homelessness. In reality, the nonprofit provided cover for city efforts to roust people from their tent sites, according to activist complaints documented in a UCLA research paper describing Urban Alchemy workers as a surveillance group, an arm of the police and a mercenary outfit intent on exploiting their workers own precarity as feel-good media narratives.. Security is something totally different. But the groups rapid growth has brought challenges. Los Angeles has opened its first government-run homeless encampment on a quiet, commercial block beside the 101 freeway in East Hollywood. Founded in 2018 with 30 staff, Urban Alchemy started out by providing one program that monitored public bathrooms in a San Francisco neighborhood. San Francisco's problem with homelessness started to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. Campers get entered into the countys database for matching unhoused people with social services, called the coordinated entry system. I mean, Ive been to prison, but you cant even make up the stories of what we see.. Some residents ask whether the workers can be effective in the most volatile situations without putting themselves in danger. Josh, too, is no longer working in Sausalito. He wanted information about whats going on at the camp, Kelly said. 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. The organization said it wouldnt seek to renew because it didnt make sense to keep coordinating a small project from San Francisco. Id rather see Urban Alchemy than the cops.. 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. We can give them the training. 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. The current contract expires on June 25. The lawsuit, which also names the city as a defendant, is ongoing. At the Sausalito tent encampment, Urban Alchemy moved three employees to other locations after altercations with community members, the organization said. 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. She previously covered immigration and local news for the Albany Times Union and the Alabama state legislature for the Associated Press. We can give them the structure.. Fresh off tens of millions in local contracts, the Urban Alchemy founder now has her sights set nationwide. We teach that in our training.. Im going to fuck you up, Josh can be heard shouting in the first second of the video. The employee responded that the situation would resolve itself, but the man was still arguing with people when Gilmore left the scene shortly afterward, she said. He just gave it to me. When a neighborhood, street or intersection earns a reputation as a place to avoid, we turn it around. Dillon said nobody else had achieved what Miller had in Bayview and Hunters Point. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Yeah my name is David and I have a similar issues the staff in Los Angeles that work in the urban alchemy 3rd Street 2301 West 3rd Street Los Angeles California accuse me of first breaking in the property which I lived on then excuse me of hateful words and they said I was using the n word and I was training staff I dont think I would ever do any of those things they just were caught sleeping and slang word for messing up I guess cuz one was asleep and the other one wasnt at the front gate and I let myself in and they changed it all around lie after lie. Urban Alchemy has been a controversial choice for the program. 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. Urban Alchemy has helped me to learn to help myself, Paradox said. Community Engagement and Outreach: calming neighborhoods and public spaces by forming bonds with residents, promoting positive behavior, and connecting people to services; this work includes placing outreach workers and community engagement specialists in neighborhoods as . Some advocates are concerned, however, that even with a $1 billion homelessness spending plan proposed for this coming fiscal year, the city is investing too much in short-term band aids over long-term solutions. The stations are dropped off and picked up daily by United. 5/3/2022. All Rights Reserved The residents of the Sausalito homeless encampment emphatically disagree about the staffs qualifications. What are you going to say, Hammonds asked, when someone comes at you like this and calls you a snitch-ass motherfing police?. He bought her a sandwich, prayed with her, then took her to the citys linkage center. Bruce criticized Urban Alchemys hiring model, saying it was a recipe for disaster to have people with troubled backgrounds acting as authority figures over the most vulnerable citizens. Urban Alchemy said issues have surfaced in a small fraction of interactions. To do that legally, courts have said, city officials first must provide alternatives. Fax: 1-202-898-1185, Copyright 2008 2019 Building community and state level buy-in is central to achieving these goals. Kennedy claims he watched Cook take an intoxicated female camper, who was stumbling when she walked, out of the camp. From February through December 2021, the City of Sausalito entered into several contracts with Uban Alchemy. Los Angeles, CA. A report published by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy attacked the nonprofit, calling it a mercenary and saying its function is to disappear visible poverty in a manner that appears less violent and more palatable than previous sweep systems.. Urban Alchemy is moving the needle where nobody else is really able to move the needle, which is because theyre doing the same old, same old, Miller said. LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Los Angeles is seeking answers to the homeless crisis. Copyright 2023 KABC Television, LLC. The San Francisco-based nonprofit Urban Alchemy, which operates three similar campgrounds in the Bay Area, has a contract with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county agency, to run the East Hollywood site. Hammonds helps a woman in distress out of the middle of Market Street. The CIRCLE dispatch center can respond to 911 calls to LAPD that aren't criminal in nature. Copyright Weeklys All rights reserved. Transforming the energy in traumatized urban spaces. For Urban Alchemys Executive Director Lena Miller, the organizations rapid San Francisco expansion is just the beginning. Despite skepticism from some homeless advocates, Urban Alchemy sees its separation from law enforcement as central to its mission. Urban Alchemy's 2022 budget shows the nonprofit receiving more than $43 million in total contract and grant revenue from the cityup from just under $36,000 in total revenue during 2018, the year it was founded. 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. ECHO's executive director, Matt Mollica, said Urban Alchemy has been active in training opportunities and expanding on-the-ground outreach. The organization said it believes that engaging in conversations and encouraging folks to care about their neighborhood is a much more effective approach than forcing people to move or having police write tickets to those who cannot afford to pay them.. The organization later urged employees to call police instead of engaging with dealers. Clark-Johnson and Hammonds came back several times. Urban Alchemy made their first contact with Sausalitos 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. 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. In San Francisco, a shooting early last year highlighted workers role in the line of fire as private patrols paid with city funds. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) The Clean. 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. Temporary housing for individuals, men and women with children. One reason the city cited for retaining Urban Alchemy was the amount of time the Sausalito police were spending at the camp. 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.. We dont have weapons, mace. Urban Alchemy secured the bulk of its work during the pandemic. Josh responded that he would take care of it. He later bought her a sandwich, prayed with her, and took her to the Tenderloin Linkage Center. 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. In December 2021, the Sausalito City Council approved a $463,620 contract with Urban Alchemy for around the clock site management services, from January through June 2022, at the Marinship encampment. Urban Alchemy is a peaceful and supportive presence, inviting communities to rebuild and restore a sense of pride and respect in urban spaces. One person claims they had to resort to sex work after the city allegedly destroyed their encampment. 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. 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 | Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images, By clicking Subscribe you confirm you have read and agree to our. Miller says this is the kind of fresh approach public officials have been drawn to when deciding to hire Urban Alchemy to provide security services for public toilets, street corners, BART elevators and homeless facilities, in addition to picking up trash. 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. The Pacific Sun contacted Cook through Facebook for comment on the allegations. 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." Until now. We didnt know who they were.. Instead of an hourly wage, they offer a non-cash basic-needs stipend, case management, employment services, and a support network within their community. During training, students learn Urban Alchemys seven values respect, integrity, empowerment, empathy, self-discipline, self-control and self-esteem. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com, kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mallorymoench, @kevinchron. When asked about the stories of assault, harassment and misdeeds at various projects, Miller said they paint an inaccurate picture and distract from the good Urban Alchemy has done. Washington, DC 20001-3736, Phone: 202-898-2444 Mitch OFarrell, the city councilmember whose district includes both Echo Park Lake and the new East Hollywood campground, declined an interview. They dont have name tags on, and some were pretty confrontational. Urban Alchemy is "moving the needle where nobody else is really able to move the needle, which is because they're doing the same old, same old," Miller said. Every day Urban Alchemys workers are out on the streets providing essential services and support for so many in our city, and we appreciate their continued partnership in bringing out the best of San Francisco. Youre using force, he said. Through emails, Clinebell detailed Urban Alchemys policies about employee drug use on the job and sex with campers. Mallory Moench (she/her) and Kevin Fagan (he/him) are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. . And lets be honest, Galperin said, when people are on our sidewalks, that is already costing us money as a city in terms of public safety, police and fire emergency services, paramedic, sanitation, street services, hospitals, jails. Cook was going to take her to the liquor store until Kennedy intervened and brought the woman back into the encampment. Powelson denies that anyone from Urban Alchemy requested more information. Because a city this offbeat deserves a newsletter with some A comprehensive rundown Elliott expressed a commitment to reduce the number of unsheltered people in San Diego County, which he cited as at least 4,476 people, nearly 55 percent of the at least 8,100 homeless residents of San Diego County. So we don't want to pick up anything that's theirs," says Sanchez. 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. One organization the city is working with, Urban Alchemy, was founded to provide career opportunities for the formerly incarcerated. They allege he is a bully. All Rights Reserved. "I haven't had a dissatisfied customer yet," says Briggs. He asked if I want to do a line and I said sure. Supportive housing for Individuals and families. Urban Alchemy provided services to homeless residents in Sausalito for almost a year. 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. We're a social enterprise that engages with situations where extreme poverty meets homelessness, mental illness and addiction. LOS. 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. They dont understand how to engage with women, Dorsey said, describing one Urban Alchemy supervisor accused of assault who was merely shifted to another post. SFs most important stories, delivered straight to your inbox, Urban Alchemy employees pick up trash, while homeless people gather belongings in the Tenderloin.