outreach

Between our regular Resource Center events, our work includes a lot of thoughtful outreach. This includes visiting encampments to do check-ins and provide supplies, following up with folks who have been placed in interim shelter or who have received housing, scheduling and taking people to their appointments, monitoring the city of LA’s brutal sweeps, and much more.

Through direct outreach, we gain a better understanding of our neighbors, as well as the laws, policies and systems perpetuating poverty and homelessness.

Want to get involved? Check out the outreach opportunities below with LA Neighbors for Neighbors and our coalition partners.

la neighbors for neighbors

palms unhoused mutual aid

Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid (PUMA) is an abolitionist network of care created in March 2020. We strive to meet immediate needs, build community and power with & among our unhoused and housing-insecure neighbors across Mid-city, Palms, and the Westside in Los Angeles. Beyond addressing immediate needs, we know that mutual aid work “hinges upon the recognition of our deep interconnectedness, and suggests ways of relating to one another that might begin to dissolve the transactional attitudes inculcated by capitalism”.

PUMA does weekly outreach across camps where unsheltered residents dwell, and at interim shelter sites across the Westside. We visit regularly to check in, bring hygiene, water, meals, and other basic needs, as well as work to connect folks to services. We have a robust harm reduction program offering supplies, including Narcan, that People Who Use Drugs (PWUD) need. We also partner with street medicine teams to provide wound care, medical consultation, and other community needs. We want our care work to be rooted in humanizing relationship-building with our neighbors and strong political organizing towards structures that allow for our collective flourishing.

Contribute: PUMA Open Collective

free food collective

Free Food Collective are abolitionists fighting for food sovereignty in LA.

Globally, 30-40% of all food is sent to landfills, where it emits methane gas (84x more potent than CO2!). Meanwhile 38 million people experienced hunger in the US in 2020. This is a humanitarian crisis and environmental disaster. Free Food Collective works to stop this on a local level by recovering excess food in LA and giving to people who need it instead.

FFC recovers fresh produce and prepared food multiple days of the week. They are working on expanding as opportunities for food recovery and volunteer capacity become available. Since they started this project in May 2021, FFC has recovered over 31,000 pounds of fresh food.

Contribute: FFC Open Collective

fairfax mutual aid

Fairfax Mutual Aid (FxMA) is a network of care formed to address our unhoused communities’ immediate needs across the Beverly Grove and Fairfax neighborhoods of Los Angeles. We recognize constituents living on the streets deserve the exact same resources, care and support as housed people.

Our goal is to provide as much community support as we can. We do this through material aid, providing transportation to resources, encampment sweep support and policy advocacy. Our work is focused on the hyper-local neighborhood, encampment and individual scales which allows us to sustain ourselves and nurture the relationships we form.

south bay mutual aid and care club

Society has fundamentally failed its members under capitalism, as evidenced by the unjust criminalization of poverty and state violence that unhoused people face. Due to this systemic failure, our unhoused neighbors have many needs that go unmet. We organize with our unhoused neighbors to resist & abolish the systems that cause these harms.

Over 60,000 people live unhoused in Los Angeles. There are neither enough shelter beds, nor adequate affordable housing, to shelter them all. Homelessness disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous, queer, and/or disabled people.

We are trying to meet their needs.

We do this because everyone deserves respect, compassion, & the resources to not just survive, but thrive as fellow human beings.

Contribute: SBMACC Open Collective